A Surprise 40th Birthday Wedding!

I want this wed­ding to be mine!

For now I’ll leave you with one of my favorite ever wed­ding reports, which is by Jason and Trudie — and with images of a truly won­der­ful, unique and spec­tac­u­lar wed­ding day by wed­ding pho­tog­ra­pher Sam Clay­ton. (When I jumped at the chance to fea­ture such a cre­ative wed­ding Sam told me, “Trudie & Jason will be thrilled. They thought their wed­ding wouldn’t be of much inter­est!” To which, all I can respond is “Pah!”)

See what you think…

Plan­ning a sur­prise wedding!

“Our wed­ding was on the 25th of June, the day fol­low­ing Trudie’s 40th birthday.

We bought our house 4 years ago know­ing that one day we intended to hold our mar­riage party in the gar­den. The house, Bridge Cot­tage, is sit­u­ated next to a river on the rise of a hump back bridge. It is very pic­turesque with a 900 year old church at the other side of the river, which is listed in the Dooms­day Book of 1086 and was where we had our ceremony.

We always knew that we never wanted a ‘tra­di­tional’ wed­ding, we knew we wanted a relaxed wed­ding with a gar­den party, fes­ti­val atmos­phere, guests in their scruffs and no expectations.

We soon realised that the only fea­si­ble way to achieve this was to have a ‘sur­prise’ wed­ding. We chose Trudie’s 40th birth­day the per­fect excuse to get our friends and fam­ily together. We spoke to Nigel, the vicar at St Michael’s, the church next door, he was very excited about the prospect of a ‘sur­prise’ wed­ding and we were all set.

We sent out invites to the party, an old school photo of Trudie which we had doo­dled on, and asked our guests to return the reply, the same photo, with their own doo­dle – prizes to be awarded on the day for best doodle.

We hoped no-one would guess our lit­tle secret!

Mean­while we cracked on work­ing on our lit­tle plan.

We always knew that Sam Clay­ton would be our pho­tog­ra­pher, this was an easy choice. Sam has worked with us for our own Funky por­trait com­pany for some years and we believe her to be one of the best pho­tog­ra­phers in Lan­cashire. Her wed­ding pho­tog­ra­phy is stun­ning and as we have a sim­i­lar cre­ative vision in images we knew we could rely on her to doc­u­ment our day beau­ti­fully. So with Sam on board (we had to tell her about the sur­prise obvi­ously!) we moved onto the next part of the plan…

Music….music is an impor­tant aspect of our lives and was one of our real blasts on the day.

We loved every minute of our research, which began on New Years Day. We dis­cov­ered Rae Mor­ris play­ing in the Jazz Café in Stan­ley Park, Lan­cashire. When we met her she was still a stu­dent and unknown, 9 months later she would play Leeds Read­ing Fes­ti­val (on the BBC intro­duc­ing stage) We chat­ted with her and asked if she would con­sider a gig play­ing at our wed­ding, she was in.

A few days after meet­ing Rae we flew out to Fuer­taven­tura with the kids. I kept them up late one evening to go to a bar which had adver­tised an acoustic gui­tar set fronted by a guy called Simon Kor­sak. We had a fan­tas­tic night and Woody (aged 5) has a mag­netic pull to any gui­tar based music, he was in awe, we all were. On our return we got in touch with Simon via Face­book, think­ing “what the heck, let’s just ask”. Simon flew over the day before the wed­ding and brought along a friend Molly along with her cello. He flew back the fol­low­ing day!

Last, but not least, a cou­ple of weeks before the ‘do’ Rae asked if her friend could come along and do a set. Her name is Karima Fran­cis; we had a look at her My Space page and spent the evening gig­gling in excite­ment. Another fab­u­lous singer-songwriter recently signed to Ver­tigo Records. We loved her song ‘The Author’ and were thrilled when she said she would sing it for our first dance.

So all that was left to do was our garden!

Our deci­sion to hold the wed­ding at our house is because we are fanat­i­cal about our gar­den. Sur­rounded by masses of blooms, par­tic­u­larly white cot­tage fox­gloves that I had sewn from seed 18 months we would have a gor­geous flo­ral dis­play. The wed­ding gave us a dead­line to get all the lit­tle jobs we needed to do in the gar­den fin­ished, along with our goats, pigs and dogs we would have the per­fect envi­ron­ment to enter­tain our guests.

We knew we needed some kind of mar­quee, espe­cially as we had to accom­mo­date the singers and as we all know you can’t count on the British weather to be kind. Hir­ing a mar­quee or tepee, how­ever much we would have loved it, was not a viable option on our bud­get, so I was over the moon when I found our fab­u­lous multi-coloured blow-up mar­quee at a vil­lage fete. Find­ing out how rea­son­able it was to hire was a bonus! We filled it with straw bales and cov­ered them with my col­lec­tion of blan­kets. I also made some giant bunting to hang around the gar­den out off odd­ments of funky fab­ric I had stashed away.

Under the guise of the ‘Birth­day Party’ friends and fam­ily offered help with food, Jason’s brother was to be in charge of the BBQ (with our very own home-reared sausages) some friends baked some pud­dings and I made large quan­ti­ties of all types of salads.

With the gar­den shed full of wine and beer we were all set.

So the day had arrived, by 3.00pm guests were arriv­ing, dressed per­fectly in their jeans and wellies.

As they drank, chat­ted and lis­tened to Rae and Karima’s sets we min­gled, dressed in our scruffs. We had hired a great face painter for the chil­dren; I really liked the idea of all the chil­dren in church with their faces painted!

We had to make our announce­ment by 4.30pm and be in church before 5.00pm for a legal wedding!

The time had come… we gath­ered our friends and fam­ily to the mar­quee to announce the win­ners of the doo­dle com­pe­ti­tion. Then I asked Frieda and Woody our two chil­dren to join me as I had a sur­prise for them. It was at this point that I asked them what they thought if mommy and daddy were to get mar­ried today. After the ini­tial shock they thought it would be great, phew! (Although I think Woody was in shock for most of the day!) Our guests looked a lit­tle stunned at first, before real­i­sa­tion set in, whoops and clap­ping swiftly ensued before they were hur­riedly ush­ered over to the church.

I only had 15 min­utes to get me, Frieda and Woody into their out­fits! For­tu­nately Sam, our pho­tog­ra­pher got Woody dressed and Sam’s mom had come to help me get dressed! Frieda got her­self dressed!

Our cer­e­mony was per­fect, all our friends and fam­ily smil­ing and happy, and all in their scruffs. Nigel, the vicar said it was his favorite wedding.

We returned to our gar­den a mar­ried cou­ple and popped the care­fully hid­den champagne.

The day con­tin­ued with a bal­loon artist cre­at­ing fab­u­lous hats, more music and lots of cel­e­brat­ing and end­ing with a great acoustic set from Simon which got every­one up and dancing.

It was our per­fect day and the best day of our lives.

I had basic dress­mak­ing skills, a small bud­get and a piece of fab­ric –actu­ally a linen bed cover I have always loved, and decided I would have a go at mak­ing my own dress.

Being fairly small, a bit of a tomboy and very short hair the ‘one’ dress was always going to be a prob­lem, in fact it is the one thing that kept me from get­ting hitched to Jason earlier!

Hav­ing a secret wed­ding made it even bet­ter; it cre­ated lit­tle expec­ta­tion of the dress.

As a teenager I would sew a lot, often knock some­thing up for the local disco, and never hemmed or fin­ished a sin­gle gar­ment. This became a long stand­ing joke between me and my mom. So it was great to carry on the tra­di­tion on the day. My mom com­mented on my unfin­ished hem, she thought it was great.

Voted the scruffi­est girl in school, I was com­pletely com­fort­able in my get up! Oh! Bet­ter men­tion high street store Zara for the cro­chet top I wore.

I loved my out­fit – it was def­i­nitely me.

I had bought my daugh­ter Frieda a beau­ti­ful vin­tage style dress from Mon­soon. I needed her to feel spe­cial and a part of what was to hap­pen, I knew she would love the pretty dress and the lit­tle bou­quet I had made. She found the hang­ing on her wardrobe door 10 min­utes before the cer­e­mony. This was def­i­nitely one of my favorite moments of the day, espe­cially as we were walk­ing to her room she asked if she would be wear­ing her leg­gings to the wed­ding.


I decided on no jew­ellery. I had tried on a head band a few weeks before the wed­ding, a funky large bow type thing but opted for absolute sim­plic­ity. The wed­ding ‘rings’ were a trio of ‘junk’ we had picked up from a car boot sale the week before!

For a girl who lives in furry boots and train­ers, com­fort was para­mount! I found a pair of flo­ral pat­terned Hush Pup­pies that I knew I would wear again and do the job on the day.

J and Woody, our lit­tle boy, wore out­fits bought at Zara, t-shirt and linen shirt for J and t-shirt, shorts and flat cap for Woody. We ini­tially tried the linen trouser look for J, but set­tled for his faith­ful ripped jeans, very Step­toe and impor­tantly J felt quite at ease in his clothes.

Rec­om­mended wed­ding suppliers

• Zara (obvi­ously pro­vided most of the wed­ding attire!) a great shop for style which suited our per­son­al­i­ties www.zara.com
• Mon­soon – for a beau­ti­ful dress for Freida www.monsoon.co.uk
• Bou­quet, a local florist who I went to the day before the wed­ding and pro­vided me with the per­fect bou­quet for Freida www.bouquet-flowers.co.uk
• Hush Pup­pies – for great shoes www.hushpuppies.com (I love hav­ing Hush Pup­pies on this list! — Claire)

Our won­der­ful singers:

• Rae Mor­ris http://www.raemorris.co.uk/
• Karima Fran­cis http://karimafrancis.com/
• Simon Kor­sak http://www.myspace.com/sikorsak

Sam Clay­ton our bril­liant pho­tog­ra­pher, we absolutely loved our pho­tographs and couldn’t stop look­ing at them, Jason even invited the post­man in to see them!

www.samclaytonphotography.co.uk

Mem­o­rable moments…

The first dance was a really spe­cial moment, danc­ing to one of our favorite songs ‘The Author’ being sung live by Karima Fran­cis in our back gar­den amongst our friends and family.

Wed­ding day advice

Def­i­nitely do the day your way, don’t feel pres­sured to con­form to tra­di­tional ideas, pro­to­col or cur­rent trends. Con­sider what is impor­tant to you, for us we wanted music to play a large part and we knew that we wanted great images to remem­ber the day, there­fore the major­ity of our small bud­get was spent achiev­ing this and worth every penny! Allow your wed­ding to reflect your per­son­al­i­ties and enjoy every minute.