Doing Sunflowers with Style: Mitton Hall Wedding

I feel as though I’ve fol­lowed Alexis’s wed­ding plan­ning jour­ney a lit­tle, and I was excited to see her wed­ding day — I’d heard all about the lovely lady from my friend and wed­ding pho­tog­ra­pher Jonny Draper months and months ago when we first met.

I admired Jonny’s approach to build­ing his (already suc­cess­ful) wed­ding pho­tog­ra­phy busi­ness around friend­ships, both with clients and wed­ding sup­pli­ers. Alexis was to become a huge part of that — I’d already seen her with Adam on their cool pre-wedding shoot in Castle­field (fea­tured here too: City Chic engage­ment shoot). I spot­ted her at the Mit­ton Hall Wed­ding Sup­per Club on Jonny’s blog, and then she mod­elled at the West Dids­bury Wed­ding Event in March — I felt as though I knew Alexis already!

I knew Alexis and Adam were excited about their wed­ding day, and I’ve been look­ing for­ward to blog­ging this for a long time! Alexis makes such a beau­ti­ful bride, and Adam looks so good in that suit! I’m delighted that Alexis has writ­ten a lovely wed­ding report for the blog — with fab rec­om­men­da­tions for some great north west wed­ding sup­pli­ers too.

Enjoy!

“Look­ing out the win­dow on the morn­ing of our big day we were faced with gray skies and rain. I spent the morn­ing at my par­ents’ house with my Mum, Dad, 6 brides­maids and flower girl whilst Adam was at our house with the boys. Con­sid­er­ing the house was filled with girls (6 brides­maids, the bride, the flower girl, my mom and the hair­dresser) the morn­ing was really calm and my Dad looked after us, mak­ing sure we were fed and our cham­pagne glasses were always topped up.

The excite­ment really kicked in when my beau­ti­ful wed­ding flow­ers arrived from Flower Design. After months of plan­ning and throw­ing ideas around with Jane I was so excited to see how she had inter­preted mine and Adam’s vision, well… she didn’t dis­ap­point! We decided that we wanted the flow­ers to be a lot of fun and kept away from hav­ing just one main type of flower. Instead I wanted to have as much vari­ety as pos­si­ble, some­thing bright and fun but com­pletely unique. And so the brides­maids’ bou­quets were all dif­fer­ent but included ele­ments of my bou­quet and the flower girls were a smaller ver­sion of mine.

Mean­while, our wed­ding pho­tog­ra­pher Jonny Draper had arrived to snap some morn­ing shots of Adam and his groom’s party relax­ing with a beer before being picked up by the wed­ding car (Chrysler 300 stretch baby Bent­ley and a baby Bent­ley for the bride and groom).

The groom’s party arrived at the church to be wel­comed by Jane from Flower Design who was wait­ing to present them each with an indi­vid­u­ally designed but­ton hole, she explained what and why she had included in their flow­ers as she pre­cisely pinned them to their jacket. They looked stunning!

I arrived at the church some­how before the brides­maids and was duly sent away by our pho­tog­ra­pher and told to do a few laps of the grounds. My brides­maids finally arrived (mak­ing the groom 15 min­utes late) fol­lowed by the bride.

The ser­vice at St. Anne’s Church was beau­ti­ful, we chose a read­ing for Adam’s sis­ter to read and my aun­tie cre­ated a spe­cial poem for us that my cousin read. We actu­ally took time to select hymns that would actu­ally mean some­thing to us. As we are both not very reli­gious or have church going fam­i­lies we really didn’t want to have that awk­ward moment when no one sings the hymns, so invest­ing in hav­ing the local choir made a huge dif­fer­ence to the cer­e­mony, I would def­i­nitely rec­om­mend this.

I bought my dress from Ambi­ence Bridal in Garstang near where I live in Black­pool. The designer was Sot­tero and Midg­ley and the dress name was Miriam. The dress was a long bodice with an A-Line tulle skirt. To make the dress more unique I asked the team at Ambi­ence to incor­po­rate a tulle shoul­der piece. I chose this dress because it com­bined all of my favorite ele­ments from other dresses I had pre­vi­ously seen. I knew that I def­i­nitely wanted a long fit­ted bodice and an A-line skirt but dif­fer­ent dresses I tried on were either too short in the body or too puffy at the waist. Peo­ple were shocked by my dress choice as they thought I would go for some­thing more fit­ted in both the body and length. How­ever, you only get to wear a big dress once and this was my chance and I’m so glad I did.

With my dress hav­ing a band of jew­els around the waist­line I didn’t want to go too bling with my acces­sories. Adam gave me a swarovski bracelet as a wed­ding gift and I bought my ear­rings and head piece from Deben­hams. After buy­ing my head piece I decided I wasn’t going to wear it as I thought it looked too much. How­ever, on the day I changed my mind and I’m glad I did as I felt it fin­ished the dress off and actu­ally com­pli­mented the jew­els on my dress and my bracelet rather than look­ing over the top.

So to the venue, Mit­ton Hall is exactly what we were look­ing for. We wanted to com­bine clas­sic Eng­lish coun­try manor meets mod­ern com­forts. We had looked at some really old build­ings that were very grand, but we never felt that they were ‘us’, didn’t reflect our per­son­al­ity, so when we found Mit­ton Hall we were delighted.

Adam and I didn’t want to go tra­di­tional when it came to the suits. Adam didn’t want him­self and his groom party to feel uncom­fort­able in a rented heavy tail suit (as those things never fit prop­erly) so we found a smart suit in Next that was too flashy for work but the navy and shine we were look­ing for. As Adam wears a suit every day for work it was impor­tant that we found some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. Also the suits made a great gift for the groom’s party rather than wast­ing the same amount of money on rent­ing. The boys all wore the same black patent shoes and belt, again some­thing Adam would never wear for work. Adams look was fin­ished off by ‘Mont Blanc’ cuf­flinks: my gift to him on our wed­ding day.

We were cer­tainly blessed with the weather for the rest of the day. As we came out of the church the sun came out which was a real relief. Although we’d tried not to get too stressed out about rain which was really helped by our photographer’s atti­tude dur­ing the build up, our pre wed­ding shoot filmed at Man­ches­ter locks was an amaz­ing day with some great pic­tures, despite the relent­less rain on the day. It gave us the con­fi­dence to relax and have total trust in Jonny to get some amaz­ing pic­tures what­ever the weather.

We con­cen­trated most of our flower bud­get on the venue for the recep­tion and wed­ding break­fast. Flow­ers don’t come cheap and we really wanted to make the most of our bud­get with­out leav­ing any areas light. So, we chose to just lightly dec­o­rate the church mak­ing use of some of flower designs great acces­sories such as bird cages and lanterns. We only had a few in the entrance to the church, but when lit looked really effec­tive and set the mood. Inside the church again was just min­i­mal with pew ends on every other pew. Some­times less is more and we were cer­tainly more than happy with the out­come. We didn’t want to have the usual huge flower dis­plays at the altar just because it’s the ‘thing to do’ and I’m really glad we didn’t now.

On arriv­ing at Mit­ton Hall we were greeted by the mas­ter of cer­e­monies Dave with a warm smile, con­grat­u­la­tions and glass of cham­pagne. But noth­ing was to pre­pare us for what waited inside the recep­tion room.

We had said to Flower Design that we had an idea of hav­ing a ‘classic/vintage Eng­lish’ theme, tak­ing some ele­ments of Alice in Won­der­land in the way that not every­thing is as it seems. Adam and I were adamant that we didn’t want it to be a ‘theme’, some­thing that was tacky or cheesy and we’re a lit­tle ner­vous as to how things would turn out. Well, we needn’t have wor­ried, we entered the room and were truly amazed at what we saw.

It lit­er­ally took our breath away, Jane and Flower Design had exceeded any expec­ta­tion we had ever had. The table dec­o­ra­tions were unbe­liev­able, so intri­cate and noth­ing like we had ever seen before. Every table was dif­fer­ent, I can’t begin to describe how many dif­fer­ent flow­ers must have been used to cre­ate the dis­plays, but they were all per­fect In their own way. Jane had worked closely with spe­cialised cakes to cre­ate the cen­tre pieces. The cakes looked like flow­ers and the flow­ers looked like cakes, we couldn’t tell the dif­fer­ence. Jane had also incor­po­rated the Eng­lish tea idea by cre­at­ing flower dis­plays out of tea pots and cups and saucers, sim­ply beautiful.

From here on in the day just seemed to get bet­ter. The sun stayed out allow­ing us to get some awe­some pic­tures, the music pro­vided by a string quar­tet set a lovely atmos­phere and the canapés went down a treat. We had a fan­tas­tic meal which every­one com­pli­mented on and we were more than looked after by the excep­tional team of Mit­ton Hall. Jonny, Dave (mas­ter of cer­e­monies and chief wed­ding coor­di­na­tor) and Paul Guard (our wed­ding singer) all worked well together mak­ing our day seem seam­less and stress free (exactly how it should be on your big day).

Our wed­ding advice would be organ­ise the most impor­tant things first which to us was: venue, pho­tog­ra­pher, flow­ers in that order. Employ the best peo­ple and you will have the best day with the best memories.

Paul sang at both the wed­ding break­fast and the evening recep­tion. Ini­tially we were a lit­tle appre­hen­sive at how enter­tain­ment at the wed­ding break­fast would work out. We didn’t want it to be chessey or too in your face but wanted to set a nice tone for the after­noon. Paul assured us he would gauge how peo­ple reacted to him and plan his set around this. Luck­ily our guests were quite lively and joined in both singing and danc­ing. Paul sang our first dance which rounded off the whole day perfectly.

Peo­ple asked us straight after our wed­ding “would you do it again?” the answer was “Only if it was EXACTLY the same”.

Our day was every­thing we wanted and couldn’t have been achieved with­out the work of care­fully selected wed­ding gurus.

Rec­om­mended wed­ding suppliers

All of our sup­pli­ers didn’t just sell us prod­ucts but sold us a great expe­ri­ence right from ini­tially meet­ing them, up until the big day. This resulted in trea­sured mem­o­ries and some great friends made along the way.

Jonny Draper (Of course!!!!) — The best pho­tog­ra­pher!! We didn’t look at any­one else’s work. We knew by look­ing at Jonny’s port­fo­lio of work and the first time meet­ing him in per­son that he was the man for the job! Wed­ding pho­tog­ra­phy blog — Jonny Draper facebook

Mit­ton Hall – A beau­ti­ful venue with a great team of staff. This venue mixes old with mod­ern allow­ing us to have the per­fect tra­di­tional Eng­lish wed­ding (we wanted this as we were mov­ing to the USA straight after the wed­ding for 2 years) in an old build­ing but with mod­ern com­forts and inte­rior design. Mit­ton Hall on facebook

Flower Design – Jane from flower design brought our ideas to life in a way Adam and I couldn’t have done alone. Flower Design on facebook

Paul Guard – An amaz­ing wed­ding singer who made our wed­ding break­fast and evening recep­tion both classy yet fun.

Spe­cial­ized cakes – Joe and Janine from spe­cial­ized cakes was rec­om­mended by Flower Design for their inno­v­a­tive cakes. Together with myself, Adam and Jane we all came up with some inter­est­ing ideas which allowed cakes and flow­ers to com­bine to cre­ate amaz­ing (all is not what it seems) table designs.

Eve Broad­hurst is not a pro­fes­sional hair­dresser but through doing some bridal mod­el­ling for Jonny Draper I was lucky enough to have her do my hair both for the mod­el­ling and on my wed­ding day. With Eve’s great sense of style I knew I wanted some­thing more nat­ural than the rigid hair-sprayed designs often pro­vided by ‘pro­fes­sional’ hair­dressers. Eve works at an amaz­ing bridal shop (The White Closet – Dids­bury) and so was on hand after doing my hair to fit me in my dress perfectly.