Erin and Russell’s Simple and Rustic Wedding in Northampton with Wildflowers and Vintage Cars, Afternoon Tea and a Maltesers Cake

Do read their wed­ding report which begins halfway down the blog fea­ture today — there is so much to share with you! Look out for tips on wed­ding invi­ta­tions for guests from over­seas as well as for Eng­lish wed­ding guests, and enjoy the images too! They’re by Northamp­ton­shire wed­ding pho­tog­ra­pher Aaron Col­lett.
Big con­grat­u­la­tions to Erin and Rus­sell, and huge thanks for the bril­liant wed­ding report and for shar­ing your big day with us on the Eng­lish Wed­ding Blog! Thanks also to Aaron Col­lett for sub­mit­ting the wed­ding and shar­ing such lovely pho­tos with us all today. Enjoy! Claire x

Erin and Russell’s beau­ti­ful, rus­tic wed­ding in Northamptonshire

Wed­ding venue: Huns­bury Hill Cen­tre, Northamp­ton

Wed­ding pho­tog­ra­pher: Aaron Col­lett

How would you describe your wed­ding style?

We went for a rus­tic, sim­ple wed­ding. We really wanted our guests and our­selves to feel relaxed and com­fort­able the entire day.

A lit­tle about the wed­ding ceremony:

We loved our cer­e­mony. At first we were appre­hen­sive about a Civil Cer­e­mony, but our Reg­is­trar, Dipna, was won­der­ful. She made us feel so com­fort­able before the cer­e­mony started. When we got to the front of the room, we already felt at ease and were able to enjoy every sec­ond of the ceremony.

Erin chose her wed­ding party to con­sist of the Sis­ters. Erin has four sis­ters, of which three were able to make it to Eng­land. The fourth was in her third trimester back in Florida! And being Russell’s only sib­ling, his sis­ter com­pleted the party.

Rus­sell chose his grooms­men care­fully when he asked his best friend from Uni­ver­sity to be his best man, his cousin who is more like a brother, and Erin’s brother.

Which read­ings did you choose?

We had two read­ings – both of which spoke to our per­son­al­i­ties. They were full of humor which allowed us to keep the cer­e­mony spe­cific to us as peo­ple. Our first read­ing was done by Russell’s cousin, Laura, who read ‘Yes, I’ll marry you my dear’ by Pam Ayres. The sec­ond read­ing was done by one of Erin’s best friends, Kyle, who read ‘I’ll be there’ by Louise Cuddon.

Tell us a lit­tle about your wed­ding venue styling and details:

Huns­bury Hill set the stage for a beau­ti­ful, rus­tic wed­ding. We did not have to do much at all except add some details. The main cer­e­mony and din­ner was held in the High Barn, which was 90sq metres of relaxed comfort.

We tied about 30 jade lanterns over the beams and dressed the tables with a sim­ple, home­made cen­tre­piece. Each cen­tre­piece was designed to give the guests some­thing to do or some­thing to talk about while they were seated.

We had an apple crate with unique antique items rang­ing from an old cam­era to books about sim­ple inven­tions that now dur­ing the mod­ern day we take for granted. We spent many week­ends hunt­ing round antique shops to see what we could find. We also added games from an older gen­er­a­tion such as mar­bles and pick-up sticks. Each crate had a unique vase filled with a few hand­picked wildflowers.

We designed the day around com­fort so one of the deci­sions we made around the food was to have a buf­fet style Eng­lish tea spread for our Wed­ding Break­fast. We did not assign seats so the guests could move around freely and even dine in the out­door patio if they wanted.

After our evening guests arrived, we treated them to some chip shop favourites. Our skil­ful caterer brought out the fryer and cooked fish, chips, bat­tered sausages, and more.

We topped off the spread with a beau­ti­ful, three tier cake made by our won­der­ful friend. We chose three dif­fer­ent lay­ers con­tain­ing choco­late cake, vanilla sponge, and choco­late brownie. Each layer was encased by a choco­late frost­ing dec­o­rated with Cad­bury Fin­gers and milk and white choco­late Maltesers.

Invi­ta­tions and recep­tion stationery:

This was one of our favorite parts of the wed­ding prepa­ra­tions. We had guests com­ing from the United States, so we went for a travel doc­u­ment theme. We first sent out Save the Dates about the end of 2011. They came in the form of per­son­alised board­ing passes. Then when we sent the invi­ta­tions in June, they were per­son­alised pass­ports, where each page detailed another part of the event. It con­tained details of the day, of course, but also sug­ges­tions on where to stay and also some things they could do while vis­it­ing England.

For the Eng­lish guests, we did the same type of invite, but omit­ted the accom­mo­da­tion and tour­ing sec­tions and instead replaced it with direc­tions to the venue. Both of these we designed and cre­ated ourselves.

What did you wear?

Erin’s dress was a soft ivory, clas­sic dress. It was sub­tly embell­ished with clear jew­els around the waist. The train was mod­est and was pinned up in time to start the danc­ing! The dress was topped off with an ele­gant bolero jacket. The Sis­ters wore their indi­vid­ual selec­tion of a jade dress with Russell’s younger cousin in a Flower Girl dress.

Rus­sell wore a tra­di­tional black tails jacket with gray pin stripe trousers and an ivory cra­vat. His grooms­men, along with Erin’s six year old nephew, wore the same attire with a jade cravat.

Mem­o­rable wed­ding day moments:

We absolutely loved our first dance. We chose ‘Unin­tended’ by Muse as it was def­i­nitely fate that brought us together. A girl from Boston, sent to Eng­land on a work assign­ment, met the man of her dreams. Any dif­fer­ent choice in life might have changed what Erin was doing in Jan­u­ary 2009 when she met Rus­sell 3,000 miles away from her home.

Wed­ding day advice:

Usu­ally I think time is the most pop­u­lar advice? We started plan­ning our wed­ding a full year before the cer­e­mony which allowed us to be cre­ative about what we really wanted. But more than that, we really made sure to keep it low key and low stress. We had heard so many hor­ror sto­ries about cou­ples going mad over the details and we wanted to make sure the day was calm and we kept focus on what it was really all for! We also man­aged to keep costs low while not sac­ri­fic­ing any­thing, good research and get­ting hands dirty goes a long way.

Wed­ding music and entertainment:

As guests were arriv­ing we played a selec­tion from ‘The Wed­ding Album’ by Roy Todd, and as Erin walked down the aisle, we played ‘Bridal March’ by Jonathan Cain. It is the most beau­ti­ful com­pi­la­tion of tra­di­tional wed­ding songs with just music and no words. Upon hear­ing it for the first time, it made the bride cry as she remem­bered to take a breath and remem­ber how mon­u­men­tal it was that they were get­ting mar­ried and their dreams were com­ing true.

Post cer­e­mony, we invited a song artist and musi­cian, Leona Pas­sow, to play two 45 minute sets. We all got to enjoy her gor­geous singing, accom­pa­nied by a fan­tas­tic solo gui­tarist. Leona cov­ered many songs rang­ing from clas­sic to contemporary.

Our evening event kicked off after the first dance, with a unique 2 hours of karaoke. All of the guests were invited to show off their amaz­ing singing skills; to call it enter­tain­ing would be an under­state­ment. After­wards, a lively and enjoy­able disco kicked off well into the night.

Rec­om­mended wed­ding suppliers:

We set our sights on the venue first and fell in love almost imme­di­ately. When we first met with the venue, they men­tioned that the wed­dings that they had booked in for 2012 already dou­ble the num­ber they had in 2011. And as we con­tin­ued work­ing with them, we could see vast changes in their com­pany. They went from a small com­pany who booked in events as and when, to a large com­pany who ended up hir­ing out their busi­ness to an out­side ven­dor to help organ­ise and main­tain their bookings.

The event coor­di­na­tor, Sarah, was extremely help­ful and pro­fes­sional and she gave us the reas­sur­ance we needed to make sure every­thing went accord­ing to plan both lead­ing up to the day as well as on the big day! www.hunsburyhillcentre.co.uk

Aaron Col­lett was our pri­mary choice for pho­tog­ra­pher. Hav­ing seen his pre­vi­ous pho­tos, we knew the style would suit us well. Aaron’s calm and con­trolled demeanour kept us at ease. He worked with us to pro­vide the shots we wanted, but took the lead when we asked him to pro­vide us with sug­ges­tions. Being as we are rel­a­tively easy-going, we gave Aaron a free reign over pho­tos, which resulted in a great final selec­tion of images. We can­not rec­om­mend him highly enough. www.aaroncollettphotography.co.uk

And what an unfor­get­table adven­ture as Erin and her imme­di­ate fam­ily drove for 45 min­utes from the house to the venue, through breath­tak­ing Eng­lish coun­try­side while rid­ing in two clas­sic cars; a 1932 Rolls Royce Open Tourer and a 1963 Austin Princess lim­ou­sine, pro­vided by Regency Car­riages. An expe­ri­ence that the Amer­i­cans are sure never to for­get! www.regencycarriages.co.uk

The great thing about Huns­bury is that they rec­om­mended their in-house caterer, Impres­sions. Know­ing we wanted the best for our money, we went away and did some research as to what other cater­ers we might work with. After talk­ing with a hand­ful of com­pa­nies, we quickly learned that Stu­art and his team at Impres­sions were not only the best at what they did, they were cre­ative, flex­i­ble, and also knew the venue inti­mately which led to excel­lent ser­vice the day of the wedding.

And as every­one knows, the bride & groom don’t have a lot of time the day of their wed­ding, so one very small detail was who the heck was going to set up the venue on the day to make sure that it was every­thing we wanted by the time we got there? The only peo­ple we trusted with this very impor­tant task would be peo­ple who were attend­ing our wed­ding as guests!

We were referred to The Wed­ding Dresser, Janet, who worked in an extremely pro­fes­sional man­ner but was also down to earth. We met her at her house well before the wed­ding, where she helped us pick out chair cov­ers, chair ties, acces­sories, etc. She even offered to do our wed­ding invi­ta­tions for us (of course at a charge). But we already had our hearts set on doing them ourselves.

Janet was amaz­ing. In a time of a lot of stress and not enough time, Janet would email us to remind us of things that she still needed from us lead­ing up to the big day. She kept us on track, showed up to the venue the day of and dressed the venue beautifully!

Our florist, Lee Berrill, did a hand­ful of beau­ti­ful bou­quets as well as sup­ply­ing us with the wild­flow­ers. He was great at mak­ing sug­ges­tions and was happy to arrange the bou­quets in a more rus­tic way to keep the feel more casual. He even added the extra touch of jade jew­els to the bride’s bou­quet to make it a bit more spe­cial. He was won­der­ful even when we asked him to make three dif­fer­ent stops the morn­ing of the wed­ding to make sure all the right flow­ers were at the right location.

And Rus­sell even sur­prised Erin when he left for his stag week­end with a Lee Berrill arrange­ment which lasted three long weeks on their din­ing room table. What a great tes­ti­mo­nial lead­ing up to the wed­ding to ensure that we had made the right deci­sion in choos­ing him as our florist!