A Truly Lovely Love Story — and a Beautiful Wedding with Dinosaurs

I love wed­dings where the bride and groom think cre­atively. Whether it’s a hand­made theme, or some­thing dif­fer­ent, artis­tic or alter­na­tive — cre­ative wed­dings make my world go round. Today’s stun­ning bride and gor­geous groom are sim­ply amaz­ing. Their wed­ding theme stems from Paul’s child­hood and from their very first Valentine’s day (not for­get­ting as far back as the Juras­sic period, I guess!) — it’s a time­less tale of the most beau­ti­ful romance. I know you’ll love this and I’m sure you’ll take some great ideas from their wed­ding day to inspire your own — it’s all about cre­at­ing a per­son­alised wed­ding style and lov­ing every minute of your day!

With huge con­grat­u­la­tions to the won­der­ful Donna and Paul — and my heart­felt thanks for shar­ing a beau­ti­ful and inspir­ing wed­ding story. Thanks also to wed­ding pho­tog­ra­pher Belinda McCarthy for shar­ing her images of the day. I’ll leave you to enjoy them! Claire xxx

PS — isn’t this the best hug you’ve ever seen?!

Wed­ding pho­tog­ra­pher: Belinda McCarthy

Spend­ing time together pho­tograph­ing new places is some­thing that Paul and I really enjoy, so choos­ing a great pho­tog­ra­pher for our wed­ding was an impor­tant thing for us. Out of all the port­fo­lios that we saw online Belinda’s really stood out as being dis­tinc­tive, highly skilled and able to cap­ture the mood and emo­tion of a wed­ding. She spent time with us before the wed­ding day to get to know us, tak­ing an inter­est in our wed­ding plans and ideas, and also demon­strat­ing how she’d direct us on the day, which helped put me at ease, as I can be self-conscious in front of a camera.

On the day, Belinda was bril­liant – she was totally unob­tru­sive, but some­how man­aged to be in the right place to take beau­ti­ful shots that really cap­ture the atmos­phere of the wed­ding. We’ll be able to look through our album years from now, and remem­ber how won­der­ful the day was, the fun we had with our fam­ily and friends, and how joy­ful it all felt.

Wed­ding film

We’re lucky to have cre­ative friends who were will­ing to spend time film­ing at our wed­ding. Chris (who first intro­duced Paul and I) filmed the cer­e­mony, speeches and first dance on an HD cam­corder, while Woody and Stroudy are putting together a Super 8 film that they shot over the whole week­end. We’re look­ing for­ward to see­ing the results!

My dad ‘gave me away’. He looked so proud and happy, and he made me feel proud too.

I walked down the aisle to ‘Waltz for Peppy’ by Ludovic Bource from the sound­track to The Artist. Walk­ing down the aisle is my favorite mem­ory from the wed­ding. It’s hard to describe how won­der­ful it was to walk into the room with my dad, and see all my friends and fam­ily gath­ered there, and then to see my soon to be hus­band Paul wait­ing for me. I walked as slowly as I could to make the moment last longer. Paul never took his eyes off me.

Paul and I danced back down the aisle to ‘Bring Me Sun­shine’ by More­cambe and Wise. Paul didn’t stop danc­ing all day!

We had 5 tracks play­ing while the guests waited for me includ­ing the Juras­sic Park theme tune and unfor­get­table by Nat King Cole — which was par­tic­u­larly impor­tant to Paul as he remem­bers it being his grandfather’s favorite song.

The wed­ding stationery:

Our favorite type of fos­sil is the ammonite. Paul has had a pas­sion for them since he found his first one on a beach when he was 8, and later researched them at Uni­ver­sity. I’ve always liked them for the beauty of their spi­ral shape. We came up with a design of tum­bling ammonites in the gem­stone colours, and we used it to cre­ate our own sta­tionery in Pho­to­shop – save the dates, invi­ta­tions, the table plan, menus, sig­nage and book­lets for our guests. It saved us some money, although it did mean that we got car­ried away tweak­ing every last detail.

We put the words of our read­ings in the book­lets, one of which we wrote our­selves, and the other of which was the very appro­pri­ate ‘A Lovely Love Story’ by Edward Monk­ton. It’s about two dinosaurs falling in love, and I bought the book and lit­tle dinosaurs for Paul for our first Valentine’s day. We put quotes and pic­tures from the poem through­out the book­let, and the lit­tle dinosaurs were on our top table.

We also had a page in the book­let to describe what the colours represented.

Tables:

The table names just had to be dinosaurs and other pre­his­toric ani­mals. We used old paint­ings of them for the table plan and table signs.

We then dec­o­rated the tables using gem­stone chips and lit­tle plas­tic dinosaurs. We col­lected the dinosaurs, and also old bot­tles at car boot sales, char­ity shops, and flea mar­kets. Best man Aaron (who is a lec­turer of Palaeon­tol­ogy) took great care to arrange them by their tax­on­omy — though I doubt many of the guests noticed! The old bot­tles of vary­ing heights were put in the cen­tre of each table with coloured rib­bons around them, and filled with bright red, yel­low and pur­ple flowers.

The place names were painted onto peb­bles which we had col­lected a few weeks ear­lier from the beach at Lyme Regis where we got engaged. We used a cus­tom made rub­ber stamp to stamp an ammonite onto the back of each peb­ble.

The wed­ding flow­ers were by Pauline Heron and Coral Gar­diner. I chose red, yel­low and pur­ple flow­ers to match the brides­maids and add color to the tables. I nearly cried when the bou­quets arrived – they were so beau­ti­ful, and I think that was the moment that it became real to me that it was my wed­ding day.

Wed­ding venue: Pris­ton Mill

The Tythe Barn at Pris­ton Mill, near Bath (http://www.pristonmill.co.uk)

We were look­ing for a large venue as we’ve got big fam­i­lies, and also some­where that would be a blank can­vas, that we could dec­o­rate in a way that would express our per­son­al­i­ties, and the inter­ests that brought us together. We didn’t realize until we’d booked the venue, but it also has a large ammonite in the barn wall, and another one in the gar­den, which fit per­fectly with our theme!

Another rea­son we chose the venue was the great ser­vice. We’d heard how good it was, and they were gen­uinely inter­ested in our plans when we went to view it. They didn’t dis­ap­point on the day either. They were pro­fes­sional, effi­cient, and noth­ing was too much trou­ble for Event Man­ager, Davy, and the rest of the team. The cer­e­mony started around an hour late due to trans­port prob­lems, but Davy got the day back on track smoothly, with­out us feel­ing rushed, and we were able to relax, know­ing that every­thing was being taken care of.

I had two wed­ding dresses:

My bridal gown has no label, so I don’t know the designer. I bought it from Ele­gant Gowns in Birm­ing­ham. It was cus­tomised for me by Just Sew Bridal Alter­ations, and had a beaded ammonite embell­ish­ment from Deb­o­rah Marie Bridal.

My evening dress is by Art Cou­ture, and I bought it from Preloved. I’m 5 feet tall and quite petite, so I imag­ined myself in a sim­ple, under­stated dress, but had no idea what style would suit me, so on the spur of the moment my mum, sis­ter and cousin took me to try some dresses on. The first dress I tried on was a big ‘state­ment’ dress… but I loved it! If fit per­fectly, made my mom cry, and just felt right. I tried on lots of other dresses, but noth­ing suited me so well.

It did need a few changes to make it more me though. I had some lay­ers of net­ting removed, the train short­ened, a mod­esty panel added, swapped the spaghetti straps for fan shaped chif­fon cap sleeves, and added a small beaded ammonite.

There was still one prob­lem though – I couldn’t dance in my dress. The search was on for a sec­ond dress, and with 5 weeks to go, and an exhausted bud­get, I still hadn’t found one. Finally I spot­ted a beau­ti­ful 50’s inspired dress on the Preloved web­site. It was per­fect for danc­ing, as it didn’t restrict me at all, and I loved the way the skirt flowed as we danced.

My veil was from Deb­o­rah Marie Bridal – a bespoke design using fab­ric and beads from my bridal gown, and includ­ing an ammonite motif match­ing that on the dress.

I had two pairs of shoes too: dur­ing the day I wore satin plat­form shoes from Belle by Para­dox Lon­don. Deb­o­rah Marie Bridal added satin roses to the shoes, to match those on the brides­maids’ shoes. In the evening I wore white shoes from Katz Bal­let & Dance Shoes.

My ‘some­thing old’ was my neck­lace with an ammonite pen­dant – so mil­lions of years old! My ‘some­thing bor­rowed’ was a wed­ding ring belong­ing to a dear aunty, who passed away some years ago.

My ‘some­thing blue’ was the rib­bon on my garter. On the morn­ing of the wed­ding Paul gave me a jew­elry box with a lit­tle trilo­bite fos­sil pen­dant inside, and I sewed this onto my garter too.

Make up and hair:

Hair styl­ist: Becks Simp­son – Thairapy

Becks did a fan­tas­tic job on my usu­ally stub­born, unstyleable hair, as well as styling some of my brides­maids’ hair and my mum’s hair, help­ing with my make-up, and tak­ing the phone to talk to a coach dri­ver about our trans­port prob­lems! She was amaz­ing! I did my own make-up with help from Becks and my brides­maid Ruth.

Paul’s suit was from Jeff Banks Bespoke. He didn’t want to dress too for­mally, or feel like a char­ac­ter from Charles Dick­ens or a 1920s politi­cian! “I wanted to dress fairly con­tem­porar­ily, and I even con­sid­ered not wear­ing any neck­wear at all. Ini­tially I opted for a bespoke three-piece gray cash­mere suit by Jeff Banks with a sim­ple straight tie. How­ever, after attend­ing a friend’s wed­ding I decided that a more tra­di­tional ivory waist­coat, and cof­fee coloured cra­vat would feel more spe­cial — and so I ordered these for all of my groomsmen.

It was great to have a bespoke suit. I wanted to look my best on our wed­ding day, and being made-to-measure, it was also com­fort­able to wear.”

Paul wore ammonite cuf­flinks that matched my ammonite pen­dant, and a badge that said ‘head boy’. He also had a change of out­fit for the evening. He took off his jacket, tie and waist­coat to reveal his red braces, changed his shoes to a pair of strik­ing red and black patent wingtip dance shoes, donned a trilby, and swept me off my feet!

I won’t say who pro­vided the groomsmen’s suits as the order was messed up, caus­ing much stress in the week before the wed­ding, and it still wasn’t right on the day although they all looked won­der­ful in the end.

Paul gave Best Man Aaron T-rex cuf­flinks and Best Man Steve ammonite cuf­flinks.

Wel­come table:

We had a wel­come table near the entrance, which was dec­o­rated with a wel­come sign, more flow­ers in old bot­tles, more dinosaurs — includ­ing a cool T-Rex given by Best Man Steve, pre-wedding presents from friends – knit­ted rab­bits and an ele­phant trin­ket box (bought for me because I love ele­phants), and a box made by my grand­dad when he was at school, that peo­ple could leave their cards in. We lined the box with paper and used the ammonite rub­ber stamp to dec­o­rate it with ammonites in the 5 gem­stone colours.

Things for children:

We had a lot of chil­dren at the wed­ding, so we bought some dinosaur bal­loons, bot­tles of bub­bles, colour­ing books and a big inflat­able dinosaur. It was great see­ing the kids hav­ing fun with them – espe­cially the lit­tle ones danc­ing with the inflat­able, which was as big as them!

We thought the plas­tic dinosaurs on the tables would go down well with the kids, but actu­ally it was the adults who seemed to be hav­ing the most fun – hav­ing dinosaur bat­tles, using them as wine glass adorn­ments, hair acces­sories, and even ear decorations!

Pho­to­booth:

We set up a pho­to­booth on the bal­cony with a back­drop made from a sheet with big ammonites painted on it, and a vin­tage case full of fun props – wigs, hats, flow­ers, an inflat­able globe, an empty pic­ture frame and more dinosaurs. We used Paul’s SLR cam­era attached to a Polaroid Pogo sticker printer. This meant that peo­ple could stick the photo into our guest­book with a mes­sage, which is a great momento, and we also have all of the pho­tos on a mem­ory card. Every­one really got into the fun of it, and we have some hilar­i­ous photos!

Other dec­o­ra­tions and things:

We made satin bunting in the gem­stone colours and hired coloured uplighters (from Rever­ies — http://www.reveriesevents.co.uk) for the back wall where the dance floor was.

We used string, and some tiny pegs, to hold up pho­tographs of our friends and fam­ily — includ­ing guests who could not make it, or were no longer with us.

With the weather fore­cast look­ing ter­ri­ble shortly before the wed­ding, we hur­riedly bought two big ivory umbrel­las. We were glad to have them, as it hardly stopped rain­ing for the whole day!

A sur­prise addi­tion was the red Star Wars light sabre that Paul got one of his best men to hide under the cake table. As every­one gath­ered to watch us cut the cake, Paul picked up the light sabre to cut it with. The look on people’s faces was price­less!

Our wed­ding cake was by Jenny Wenny Cakes. We are for­tu­nate to have an extremely tal­ented cake artist as a friend. Jenny trav­elled from Cal­i­for­nia, laden with giant cake pans, to attend our wed­ding and make our wed­ding cake.

Paul and I were inspired after attend­ing a screen­ing of the 1925 silent film ‘The Lost World’. We had a crazy idea for our cake to be a flat-topped moun­tain like Mount Roraima in South Amer­ica, with us (the bride and groom) on top, fend­ing off dinosaurs with an Indi­ana Jones style whip and flam­ing torch.

Jenny rose to the chal­lenge and cre­ated our moun­tain com­plete with water­fall using a deli­cious two-tiered cake — car­rot cake with cran­ber­ries, raisins and wal­nuts, and also vanilla cake with vanilla cream and raspberries.

The cake top­pers were made by Fer­nanda Rodriguez (again based in Cal­i­for­nia). The dio­rama was com­pleted with dinosaur mod­els, sourced by Paul and best Man Aaron on a fun trip around the toy stores of Bristol.

As if that wasn’t enough, Jenny made us an ammonite shaped groom’s cake with yummy choco­late mud and choco­late ganache, and some cute vegan cup­cakes topped with ammonites.

(There’s a black and white pic­ture of me with my mouth open when I saw the fin­ished cakes for the first time!)

The brides­maids

I love bold colours, and had the idea of hav­ing each of my five brides­maids in a dif­fer­ent color cor­re­spond­ing to dif­fer­ent gem­stones – coral red, amethyst, onyx, amber and turquoise.

I didn’t realize how much of a task it would be to find five match­ing dresses in the right shades! In the end, I had the satin dresses made from a pat­tern, by 3 dif­fer­ent seam­stresses in dif­fer­ent parts of the UK, and then added fab­ric roses made by Deb­o­rah Marie Bridal.

It was worth it though – my brides­maids all looked gor­geous, and the dresses added a wel­come splash of color on a rainy day.

I bought the brides­maids’ shoes on eBay and got them dyed in the var­i­ous colours to match the brides­maids dresses.

Each brides­maid wore an oval pen­dant with the gem­stone that inspired their dress color.

Wed­ding entertainment

The Paper Moon Band: Paul and I had been learn­ing swing danc­ing together, and first heard the fan­tas­tic Paper Moon Band at a dance fes­ti­val in Bris­tol. Book­ing the band for our wed­ding was one of the best deci­sions we made. It’s some­thing we’ll always remem­ber, and one of the things our guests have com­mented on most as some­thing they’ll remem­ber too.

DJ: Our friend Jason has DJ’d for other friends wed­dings and par­ties, and always plays great music that gets peo­ple on the dance floor, so we didn’t con­sider any­one else. It was great to see every­one hav­ing fun, danc­ing the night away.

Wed­ding advice:

Donna: Per­son­al­is­ing our wed­ding made it even more spe­cial. Paul and I spent a lot of time together plan­ning, talk­ing about what was impor­tant to us, and com­ing up with ideas and designs together. We made a great team. It was also great to get so many of our friends and fam­ily involved. Our par­ents, sib­lings and friends helped source details for the dec­o­ra­tions, and find acces­sories for me and the brides­maids and flow­er­girls. In the last cou­ple of weeks before the wed­ding we had a steady stream of vol­un­teers arriv­ing to help make bunting, paint name places and the pho­to­booth back­drop, dec­o­rate vin­tage cases, clean old bot­tles, sort plas­tic dinosaurs etc, etc. We’d never have got it all done with­out them!

It was won­der­ful to see all our ideas com­ing together, and to have those details on our wed­ding day. Not every­thing went to plan, but we didn’t let any­thing of those lit­tle things spoil our day, and I think that that’s my main advice to any Bride to Be – enjoy your day no mat­ter what. In the end what really made the day incred­i­ble was me and Paul get­ting mar­ried, how much love we have for each other, and hav­ing the most fan­tas­tic cel­e­bra­tion with the peo­ple we love.

One other lit­tle tip – We left the top table in between courses to visit each of the other tables. The day goes by at such a pace, that you don’t get as much time with every­one as you’d like, but at least this way we were able to chat to every one of our guests before the meal was over.

Paul: Be sure to get every­thing out of the way before the wed­ding day. I spent much of the morn­ing fran­ti­cally try­ing to get the music together on CDs, trans­fer my speech to cue cards (before Aaron sug­gested I just put it on his iPad!), and sort a few other things out. I would have pre­ferred to spend the time with my friends and fam­ily relax­ing before the event.

On the wed­ding day itself take some time out with your bride and dis­ap­pear for a few min­utes alone. The day flies by so quickly and you’ll be pleased that you took some time to reflect on the fan­tas­tic day you’ll be having.

We didn’t plan to have a par­tic­u­lar theme. We just wanted our wed­ding day to reflect our per­son­al­i­ties, and the things we’re both inter­ested in, and that we enjoy doing together – geol­ogy (includ­ing fos­sils and dinosaurs), pho­tog­ra­phy, danc­ing, nature, travel and adven­ture. We wanted to cre­ate a relaxed atmos­phere — we never wanted the event to be overly for­mal. Most of all we wanted the wed­ding to be cel­e­bra­tory, and for us and our guests to have fun.

In the end though, the geol­ogy touches evolved and took over, and I think most peo­ple would say we had a dinosaur and fos­sil themed wed­ding!

Paul’s dad drove me and my dad to Pris­ton Mill. He even wore a chauf­feurs hat. It was lovely to have Paul’s dad with us, while we nego­ti­ated fords and oncom­ing trac­tors on the coun­try lanes lead­ing to Pris­ton Mill and my hus­band to be, who was wait­ing patiently for us to arrive. I was so excited and happy, and I gripped my dad’s hand the whole way.

Our wed­ding favours were choco­late ammonites from Choco­ras­sics in Uplyme, They moulded the choco­lates using a real ammonite which had been found in Lyme Regis on the beach where Paul pro­posed to me.

Our first dance track was ‘Bei Mir Bist Du Shon’ which we chose because it was good to dance. It has dif­fer­ent paced sec­tions — from really fast to slow. When we first met we were so bad at danc­ing together, that we trod all over each other’s toes. It took me a while to con­vince Paul, but in Jan­u­ary we started to learn swing danc­ing at Swing Dance Bris­tol. We were hooked almost imme­di­ately. Danc­ing became some­thing fun to do together, and almost an obses­sion — and we’ll def­i­nitely carry on going danc­ing now we’re back from hon­ey­moon. One of the best things about swing danc­ing was that we learnt to impro­vise rather than learn­ing a rou­tine, which meant that our first dance was all about our con­nec­tion with each other, and we just did whichever moves felt right at the time. It was the most per­fect dance we’d had together, and was just exhil­a­rat­ing.