A Wedding On A Budget

Throughout the planning process I had a lot of comments and questions here about how we were managing to stick to a small budget for our big day. With the average UK wedding registering at an eye-watering £21,000, our aim of spending £4k or less looked naive at best. But achieving our wedding on a budget actually turned out to be incredibly easy.

For a start, it helped that we were consciously trying to do things a little differently and keep it low-key, and so didn't want a number of traditionally expensive extras such as wedding cars or fancy floral arrangements. But what truly enabled us to stick to such a small budget was the help of friends and relatives, many of whom already work in the wedding industry. Now, I appreciate that this isn't a tip most people will be able to replicate for themselves, but knowing a wedding photographer, a professional cake maker, and a graphic designer specialising in wedding stationery was an enormous contributing factor in our wedding eventually coming in at a not-so-whopping £3,272*. However, the following tips are hopefully more easily replicable.

* In actual fact, our entire spend was just under £6k, but for the purposes of this post I'm only counting the elements that would be part of a more traditional wedding day. The extra £2,600 paid for a large family brunch on the morning of the wedding and - something that was incredibly important to us - hotel rooms for all the guests travelling from overseas. We basically booked out three floors of the city centre Premier Inn for the weekend!

Decide what your main priorities are & allocate money accordingly

Ours priority was food and drink. We wanted yummy cake & fizz for after the ceremony, amazing vegan & vegetarian food, and enough free booze that people could get a bit tipsy. And so that's where the majority of our budget went.

I've had the pleasure of being friends with the brilliantly talented Elle Jane since we met through blogging years ago, and our wedding coincided with her going into business as an occasion cake-maker. She made us 200 beautiful bite-size cupcakes to enjoy after the ceremony with glasses of Prosecco, which I bought from Tesco during one of their regular "Buy 6 bottles get 25% off" promotions.

Meanwhile, the meal was a real highlight of the day. Our fabulous reception venue, The Lansdowne, served up a delicious three course meal for a mere £18.50 a head, which meant we had money left over to put behind the bar.

Avoid bridal shops if you're on a strict budget

When it came to outfits I knew two things for sure: I wanted something comfortable and relatively non-bridal (and if it featured polka dots then so much the better), and I wanted to spend as little as possible. In the end, I managed to find my literal dream dress in the sale at Lindy Bop for a mere £16. Yep, you heard right, £16.

That sorted, I found polka dot dresses for my nieces - Gracie's turquoise dress was also from Lindy Bop at about £11, while Amelie's pink number cost £20 from Amazon - a cheap petticoat from eBay, and a pair of teal Mary Jane shoes which I'd spotted years ago in Clarks and loved, and eventually tracked down on eBay, paying £13.

All of which left enough in the budget for Thomas to splash out on a new suit from Slaters in Leeds which, thanks to having previously worked in the Glasgow branch, he got a discount on. Picking up a pair of secondhand brogues from a vintage store in Bristol left Thomas suited and booted for just over £100.

My advice, then, would be to avoid traditional bridal stores (particularly if you know you want something less traditional and structured) and embrace secondhand shops and eBay as sources.

Reuse & repurpose

I was also really keen to use the beautiful 1940s diamond ring I'd inherited from my granny and, as I wasn't fussed about having a traditional wedding band (in fact, without the existence of my granny's ring I don't think we'd have bothered with rings at all), it made sense to repurpose it as my wedding ring. Meanwhile, ever keen to keep costs low, we bought Thomas's hammered silver ring from Etsy for just £18.

Do It Yourself (or get a mate to do it for you)

Partly to keep costs down and partly for the reasons outlined in my post on planning an anxiety-free day, we kept things incredibly simple and pared back. No favours, no bouquets (actually this is maybe my only regret - in retrospect I would have loved a bunch of sunflowers), no complicated table settings beyond jars of flowers. And I don't think anyone attending the day at any point thought, "you know what, I'd be enjoying myself so much more if there was more stuff around."

But what we did have, we did ourselves (or, more accurately, roped in people to do for us).

The flowers were from supermarkets, arranged into jam jars (collected by friends in the months leading up to the day) with the kind help of my cousins, and dropped off at The Lansdowne on the day by a friend (who also made the tree trunk sign below).

The seating plan was a vintage suitcase that usually sits on our wardrobe, strung with twine and with beautifully calligraphed cards pegged onto it. My cousin Sadie volunteered for the writing, cousin Caroline's husband Steve did the stringing, and in the space of an afternoon we had it finished for the cost of four sheets of card and some mini pegs from Paperchase.

So my advice would be to keep things as simple as you dare and, for everything else, get people involved. I had so many friends and cousins not only willing to pitch in but actively wanting to help.

Think outside the box

Finally, my absolute top tip would be to consider non-traditional venues. There's not many places you could feed 70 people for less than £20 each, but your favourite local gastro pub may just be one of them. Even if they don't do normally private hire, it's worth asking (opting for a weekday wedding is also a huge money-saver: ours was on a Monday).

I also can't emphasise enough how much we loved hosting the party at a place we were so familiar with and fond of, with staff who knew us and enjoyed celebrating alongside us. We still get such a kick from going back to The Lansdowne for a pint and remembering what an ace time we had there with our friends and family.

Price Breakdown
Food & drink: £1846
Outfits (mine, Thomas & bridesmaids) & rings: £268
Flowers: £57
Ceremony venue: £670
Extras (including photographer, taxis, make-up artist, balloons, confetti, gifts etc): £432

My other wedding posts:

A Very Leicester Wedding

Our Feminist, Humanist Ceremony

A Great Excuse For A Party

Planning An Anxiety-Friendly Wedding

All photographs by James Mottram Photography

A Very Leicester Wedding

Our wedding in July was very much centred on the city Thomas and I call home. Because the vast majority of guests were from out of town, it was really important to us that we use the event to highlight the things about which we're most proud when it comes to Leicester, including its history, its diversity, and its incredible vegan food to name just three.

Ironically, considering how central a role the city ended up playing, our original plan was to have the wedding out of Leicester in a rural setting. When we quickly realised that a festival-style wedding was going to require a hell of a lot of work and money to create, we went back to the drawing board and decided on an urban wedding that celebrated our home town, instead.

As soon as we decided to host it here we knew what our first choice of reception venue was: our favourite pub, The Lansdowne. Only problem? They don't usually do private hire and had never hosted a wedding reception before. We decided to ask anyway, as the worst they could say was "No" and, lucky for us, they barely hesitated before agreeing to let us hire the whole place and cater a three course, mostly vegan menu, for 70 guests.

The Lansdowne is our favourite pub for three reasons: great food, fantastic and friendly staff, and incredible mid-century interiors. And those elements made it the perfect place to host a wedding reception. Sadly, we were all too busy having fun and scoffing the food to take pictures of it but rest assured it was amazing. Many guests, even those who aren't vegan or vegetarian, commented on how much they enjoyed the meal. Meanwhile, it meant so much to us that the staff were visibly enjoying themselves and happy for us; because it's our regular haunt, it felt completely different to having the reception at a faceless corporate venue. We know the staff well and it genuinely felt like they were part of our celebration.

Another favourite element of our wedding day was the walk we took through Leicester from our ceremony venue, the Guildhall, up to the Lansdowne. Although about a 20 minute journey on foot, most of the route follows the beautiful Georgian-era tree-lined, traffic-free pedestrian path known as New Walk. I especially am a big fan of urban walking and it was important to me that this was incorporated into the event.

After a week of solid rain, and fretting that we'd have to find alternative transport, our wedding day dawned bright and sunny and the walk was on! From a chant of "F*ck the police" begun by Thomas' friends (see photo above - they said walking in a big group reminded them of being on protest marches), to dancing bridesmaids, to passing well wishers greeting us, it was such a special part of the day and the photographs are some of my favourites.

Aside from the wedding itself, we'd also planned a number of other events so we'd get a proper chance to hang out with guests. On the morning of the ceremony we hosted a brunch for family members, which was a lovely way to ensure we spent some quality time with family - all of whom had travelled from out of town, most from out of England - before the actual wedding later in the afternoon. And on the previous evening we invited friends and family who were staying in local hotels to join us for pizza at our favourite joint, Oscar & Rosie's. This turned out to be a really calming and fun way to spend the night before the wedding, and it helped people to meet each other in a more relaxed environment (my uncle from Canada and Thomas' dad especially seemed to hit it off and chatted a lot the next day).

We also put together a little mini-zine telling people about our favourite places in Leicester to visit - from museums to galleries to the best place to get gelato - and had so much fun chatting to friends who'd followed our suggestions and hearing what they thought. Considering we had guests from some of the most incredible places in the world - New York and Cape Town among them - I think we did a reasonable job of introducing people to our little city. I am so glad we decided to have the wedding here, because now when I walk around town I have some incredible new memories to accompany places I've been familiar with for years. Seeing the people we care about most come to the place we've both grown to love was indescribably special: if you're considering an urban, home town wedding, I'd thoroughly recommend it.

My other wedding posts:

Our Feminist, Humanist Ceremony

A Great Excuse For A Party

Planning An Anxiety-Friendly Wedding

All photographs by James Mottram Photography

A Public Saying To All Our Friends: Our Wedding Ceremony

When you're planning a wedding ceremony from scratch there's so much to think about. We wanted ours to be entirely different from the traditional legal wedding ceremony, both in wording and in structure. We wanted it to reflect our values, as individuals and as a couple, and to be explicitly feminist. Most importantly, we wanted it to be fun.

We'd chosen Leicester's Guildhall for our ceremony for a number of reasons, chief amongst which was OH MY GOD JUST LOOK HOW BEAUTIFUL IT IS! It was also, being a council-run venue, reasonably priced, and the staff were amazing and totally on board with our plans for a quirky, untraditional ceremony.

Having greeted all our guests together (which was lovely and something I'd highly recommend, as it gave me a chance to say hello to everyone - and admire their outfits - instead of sitting somewhere 'backstage', as brides usually do, feeling increasingly nervous), everyone was seated ready to begin. Instead of entering separately or, god forbid, me being 'given away' by my dad, we walked into the ceremony hall together to the strains of Sam Cooke's You Send Me.

Our friend Richard was officiating the ceremony for us, partly because as a teacher, he had the perfect voice to fill the hall and the confidence to stand up in front of 70 people. Although he confessed later that he'd felt anxious about it, you'd never have guessed.

Richard opened with a beautifully written, and very funny, speech, and was followed by Julia, Thomas's sister, reading the Marge Piercy poem that I shared in my last wedding post. We'd decided to have all the speeches within the ceremony, rather than at the party afterwards, so two of Thomas's best friends - Bart and Tim - gave what became the equivalent of a best man's speech (I certainly wasn't expecting the word "balls" to be bandied around quite so much!). My mum also spoke, beautifully and movingly, and two friends - Cara and Mathijs - both gave readings.

"In my opinion the best thing you can you do is find a person who loves you for exactly what you are. Good mood, bad mood, ugly, pretty, handsome, what have you, the right person will still think the sun shines out of your ass. That’s the kind of person that’s worth sticking with."

From the film Juno

We'd chosen our readings carefully because we wanted them to reflect not just the ethos of our day but also the person reading. So Julia, one of the bravest and most awesome feminists I know, got the Marge Piercy poem. Cara seemed perfectly suited to the extract from Juno (plus it has the bonus of being short, as she wasn't wild about having to speak in public). Finally, Mathijs read a quote from the film Frida which we knew would suit his oratory style and, for us, summed up everything we hoped for about our marriage.

"I don't believe in marriage... I think at worst it's a hostile political act, a way for small-minded men to keep women in the house and out of the way, wrapped up in the guise of tradition and conservative religious nonsense. At best, it's a happy delusion - these two people who truly love each other and have no idea how truly miserable they're about to make each other. But, when two people know that, and they decide with eyes wide open to face each other and get married anyway, then I don't think it's conservative or delusional. I think it's radical and courageous and very romantic."

From the film Frida

My strongest memory of my whole wedding day - but particularly of the ceremony - is of laughter. We'd wanted it to feel relaxed and joyful, and for people to feel more involved in proceedings than  the traditional ceremony usually allows. Having a friend officiate and therefore removing the legal stuff meant every single word was meaningful and personal to us. But we retained some bits of a traditional ceremony, for example exchanging rings and saying vows, although our vows were ones we'd written together:

"I commit myself to our life together because I love who you are now
and who you are yet to become.

I promise to stand with you and to fight with you for everything we believe in.

I promise to support your freedom to be, to grow and to do all you wish."

And then, all too soon, it was time for Prosecco and cake in the Guildhall courtyard, and a chance to properly catch up with people (I recall a lot of hugging and squealing, most of it from me).

It's been wonderful, while writing this, to reflect on our ceremony and I'm very glad to say that with the benefit of hindsight there's nothing we'd do differently. We had so very many lovely comments afterwards, saying how much people had enjoyed and been moved by the ceremony. I'm going to end by quoting our friend Rose who, the day afterwards, wrote the following on Instagram:
"I'm not a fan of weddings [preach!]. They are largely tedious exercises in conspicuous consumption in the services of an archaic institution. But Janet and Thomas's was utterly joyous and felt totally authentic to them as a couple." Wedding goals achieved.

All photographs by James Mottram Photography

My other wedding posts:

A Very Leicester Wedding

A Great Excuse For A Party

Planning An Anxiety-Friendly Wedding

A Great Excuse For A Party

We didn't want to call it a wedding. We avoided using that word on the invitations and, in conversation and social media posts, opted for phrases like liefdesfeestje and celebration instead.

Our motivation when planning was simple: to get all our friends and family together for a big party. Why not just do exactly that, I hear you ask. Just throw a party and not bother with the wedding stuff? It'd be easy, right? Well, for most people maybe. But not if your parents are immigrants so you don't have any relatives in the UK, and your partners best friends all live in other countries. Then, it's less easy to get people together for 'just' a party. We had to ask ourselves, what would motivate people to travel hundreds or even thousands of miles? Only a wedding, a celebration, a liefdesfeestje, would do.

Still, though we continued to avoid the W-word (although we also got annoyed when my mum and step-mum said "It wasn't really a wedding" - go figure). For reasons both political and personal - weddings, lets face it, aren't very cool or punk - both Thomas and I resisted until, a few months before the celebration, we came across a poem that ended up playing a central part of our ceremony. Read beautifully by Thomas' sister, Julia (a fellow kickass feminist), I'm going to reproduce it here because, for me, there's nothing that better explains how we came to be at peace with the W-word and, indeed, with the notion of marriage.

Why Marry At All by Marge Piercy

Why mar what has grown up between the cracks
and flourished like a weed
that discovers itself to bear rugged
spikes of magenta blossoms in August,
ironweed sturdy and bold,
a perennial that endures winters to persist?

Why register with the state?
Why enlist in the legions of the respectable?
Why risk the whole apparatus of roles
and rules, of laws and liabilities?
Why license our bed at the foot
like our Datsun truck: will the mileage improve?

Why encumber our love with patriarchal
word stones, with the old armor
of husband and the corset stays
and the chains of wife? Marriage
meant buying a breeding womb
and sole claim to enforced sexual service.

Marriage has built boxes in which women
have burst their hearts sooner
than those walls; boxes of private
slow murder and the fading of the bloom
in the blood; boxes in which secret
bruises appear like toadstools in the morning.

But we cannot invent a language
of new grunts. We start where we find
ourselves, at this time and place.

Which is always the crossing of roads
that began beyond the earth’s curve
but whose destination we can now alter.

This is a public saying to all our friends
that we want to stay together. We want
to share our lives. We mean to pledge
ourselves through times of broken stone
and seasons of rose and ripe plum;
we have found out, we know, we want to continue.

"A public saying to all our friends," isn't that beautiful? The poem brought us round to thinking about the purpose of weddings, of the ways in which they can be a positive declaration and, yes, a celebration. Ultimately, we found ourselves realising, we could call it whatever we liked but if you're both wearing fancy clothes and saying vows and there's cake and confetti, it's probably a wedding. And a really great excuse for a party.

All photographs by James Mottram Photography

My other wedding posts:

Our Feminist, Humanist Ceremony

A Very Leicester Wedding

Planning An Anxiety-Friendly Wedding

A Short Break In Wales

As we're still waiting for our wedding photographs to be ready, I thought I'd start at the end: with our post-wedding trip to Wales. Unfortunately, we were both in the opening stages of the virus that's been kicking my ass for the past couple of weeks, so it wasn't quite the romantic mini-break we'd envisaged. Rather less champagne-on-the-veranda and more catarrh-on-the-sofa, but we still had a lovely time.

We started off with a night in Hay-On-Wye, Wales' official book town and somewhere I always enjoy visiting. We'd booked into Radnor House B&B and would heartily recommend it: a reasonable price for an insanely luxurious room in the centre of Hay, and the most incredible breakfast (French toast for me, a vegan fry-up for Thomas).

We spent some time on Thursday afternoon and again on Friday morning pootling around the town, popping into all of the (many) bookshops and picking up some bargains. I usually visit Hay during the festival, and it's always nice to see the town a little calmer and quieter (albeit lacking the exciting buzz of festival time). 

Having struggled to find vegan options for Thomas on Thursday, it was a relief to stumble upon the marvellous vintage shop/independent makers' marketplace/vegetarian cafe/venue space at The Old Electric Shop. Fully fed and watered, we set off to drive to our final destination on the west coast of Wales.

A three hour drive later and we were in Aberporth. I'd read about Wendy, the vintage train carriage-cum-holiday let located on the cliffs at Aberporth clifftop, years ago on Gemma's blog and had bookmarked it because I knew train-mad Thomas would love it. By some strange quirk of fate, the usually fully-booked carriage happened to have two nights free the weekend after the wedding: it was meant to be!

Wendy was just as charming as I'd expected, full of cute vintage details that had Thomas fantasising about living in a train carriage full-time (two days later and the reality of being a 6'4" man in a small space had sunk in and he wasn't so keen!).

After a week of rain, Saturday dawned bright and sunny and we took advantage of the weather to walk the coastal path - which runs directly in front of Wendy - to the nearby village of Tresaith for lunch at The Ship Inn. The coast of west Wales is just stunning, reminiscent of Cornwall at its finest (although with significantly fewer crowds), and the stretch from Aberporth to Tresaith shows it off at its best. After a pint or two, we retreated back to Wendy and spent the afternoon reading some of our Hay book haul, log burner lit for extra cosiness.

It was a lovely few days away and just what we needed after the wedding. And although it's a shame neither of us were well, it does give us a good excuse for another honeymoon!

I Have A Wedding Hangover

Our leftover confetti, as seen the next morning when we went to clear up

I have the hangover from hell: a wedding hangover.

Two weeks ago today was the day Thomas and I had spent the previous three years planning and now I'm looking around my house, empty at last of wedding supplies, and feeling a bit empty myself.

Because it turns out that all of those old cliches are true.

It will go by in a flash.

Enjoy every moment, it goes so fast.

It's the best day of your lives.

This last I had been especially resistant to in the run-up to the big event. "Best day of my life," I scoffed, "I like to think my life is more interesting than one in which participating in an ancient patriarchal ritual is the best day I ever experience."

Well, don't I have egg on my face. What I should have realised was that, for us, the ritual isn't what makes it the best day ever, but the people who came to participate in it.

I can't properly describe to you how beautiful it was when I looked around the room and saw my family, who'd travelled from five different countries, the Nijmegen gang who'd decamped to Leicester for the weekend, Thomas' Scottish friends & family, and my local pals, all gathered together to celebrate with us. It's humbling to be faced with such love and affection: people who care so much about our stupid selves that they travelled hundreds or thousands of miles to share in our joy.

I'm tearing up writing this, realising that never again will that strange, wonderful combination of people come together, never again will we get to experience such a special day. So my advice to anyone planning a wedding at the moment? It will go by in a flash, enjoy every moment. And it is the best day of your lives.

Note: many more wedding posts to come, don't worry! (She says, as if you're all so desperate to read more of me boring on about it. Well tough cos I'm gonna). But I'm really sick at the moment so it'll have to wait until I'm better.

I Will Not Be A Perfect Bride

I will not be a perfect bride and I will not have a perfect wedding.

I will be a size 18 bride, as I am a size 18 woman. I haven't slimmed for the wedding, haven't tried to turn myself into a different, smaller version of the person Thomas fell in love with. I understand why, in a society in which fat-shaming and diet culture are pervasive, many brides choose to diet. But I won't, I didn't. I will wear my double chins and my back fat and my stomach with pride. I will not be a perfect bride.

I will be a scarred bride. I am blemished and tattooed and scarred and I will not cover them with clothes or with make-up. I will wear the marks on my body because they are my history, each one bringing me closer to the person I am today, the person who Thomas knows and loves. I will not be a perfect bride.

I will be a bride with a chronic illness. I will be carefully attending to my medication regimen and diet in the next three weeks but, nevertheless, I will be a bride who needs the loo a lot on her wedding day. I will not be a perfect bride.

I will be a bride with as little anxiety as possible, which means that I will not have a perfect wedding. It will not be very Instagrammable, nor will it look like a Pinterest board. It will be simple and ramshackle and DIY. But it will also be silly and fun and oh-so-very 'us'.

Because while I will not be a perfect bride, I will be a very happy bride. I will be surrounded by family and friends, who are collectively travelling a total of 61,000 miles to be with us in Leicester. Every aspect of our day - from the reception venue to the cakes to the photographer - involves people we know and love. And, most importantly, I will be with my boy. The one who goes into another room to eat crisps because he knows I can't stand the noise. The one who took six weeks to kiss me when we started dating. The one who thinks my most annoying quirks are not just tolerable but actually cute. And while he won't be a perfect bridegroom, either, he will be - and is - perfect for me.