Wedding Table Styling and Venue Dressing
Where do you start when it comes to your wedding tables and your venue dressing, I guess it all depends on your ideas and your budget. When it came to the wedding venue dressing and the table decorations, this was really looking forward to, the creative part! Here’s some things that I found really helpful for approaching the table styling and venue dressing.
Create a Vision / Mood Board – take some time to go through all types of magazines to look for inspiration.
Attend Wedding Shows, Open Days and Wedding Fairs (especially the ones held at your venue) – there is nothing better than seeing venues dressed and styled for a wedding, especially the venue that you’re getting married at.
Reflect on Previous Experience – have a think about weddings, parties and events that you’ve already attended, was there a good idea that would work at your wedding?
Unique Wedding Centrepieces
Our wedding centrepiece inspiration came to me during a visit to a garden centre with my mum. I spotted some gorgeous terrariums and had this idea to put roses and pearls in them.
After some research to find exactly what I was looking for, I found the perfect terrarium solution at The Range. What followed was a few months of buying their current stock and then waiting to be notified of the next stock availability. We got there in the end and our 12 terrariums were sourced.
Creating Your Own Wedding Centrepieces
Creating the centrepieces was a really enjoyable, therapeutic task. I bought the pearls from eBay and purchased some artificial flowers from Dunelm.
The whole centrepiece creation process took place over two evenings, and it was a relaxing task at a stressful point right before the wedding (the start of the pingdemic!).
The biggest advantage of creating our own centrepieces is that we were able to give them to family and friends on the wedding day as a special keepsake.
Wedding Favours and Place Settings
There’s so many fantastic ideas for wedding favours from the traditional sugared almonds (there’s a significant meaning to these), shots, lottery scratch cards, mini bottles of spirits, Krispy Kreme donuts, a jar of pick n mix sweets, flower seeds and a rubber duck – these are all wedding favours that we’ve received.
We found our perfect charity wedding favour, a bee pin (we’re from Manchester) with ‘Meant To Bee’, from the MacMillan Cancer Charity. There’s lots of great favour ideas on charity websites so do check out the fantastic ideas they have to offer. We also bought some Bride and Groom pins and our Wedding Guest Book from the British Heart Foundation.
Our wedding favours also provided the solution for our individual place settings. We created little name tags (featuring our wedding branding) that we could attach to the ribbon on the wedding favours.
Wedding Table Names
We decided to use places that we’d visited as our table names. However, we added a personal touch by getting our wedding invitation artist Christopher Walster, to draw each of the places. And now we’ve got them all as a keepsake.
The Wedding Table Plan
This can be one of the most challenging and stressful parts of the wedding planning, deciding where to seat all your guests. There’s so many things to think about, do you keep family and friends together? Do you mix it up? Will everyone get along? How do you prioritise who sits nearest the top table?
In some ways, the pandemic made this part easier for us, as we concentrated on keeping family / friend groups together. Also, we were aware that all our guests were looking forward to seeing each other and catching up, so it didn’t seem right to separate them all unnecessarily.
We finally achieved the table plan and then the venue forgot to put it out on display, on the easel – C’est la vie, you can’t control everything! I’m sure our guests found some amusement in finding their seats and everyone was sat in the right place by the time we were welcomed as the new Mr and Mrs!
Wedding Venue Stylists
There’s so many exquisite ideas and creations that can be used for your wedding day. Dedicated venue stylists will offer an Aladdin’s Cave worth of options to suit everything you can think of for your wedding day, from extravagant centrepieces, signs, wedding gift post boxes, candles, to name but a few.
The great part about their approach is that they will also hire items out to you, and then they will charge a fee for organising / moving their creations, and collecting everything the following day.
Along with all the options that were offered by our wedding venue, we also worked with a fantastic lighting company Peter Lockwood Lighting who provided the stunning pillar lighting to enhance our ceremony room. This idea was only brought to my attention following a visit to a wedding fair at our chosen wedding venue location.
MY WEDDING WISDOM
THE WEDDING STYLING HINTS AND TIPS
Attend Wedding Fairs
Attend some wedding fairs, especially the ones at your venue or local to your venue. This will expose you to exactly what’s on offer and also to a range of local suppliers.
Be Sustainable
It’s definitely worthwhile (and cost effective) to hire items out for your wedding. This saves on time and energy but also helps the environment.
Be Savvy
Shop around, ask friends for their help, work with other couples – there’s lots of great ways to style your venue without buying everything.
Get Things Delivered
Time is so valuable near your wedding so don’t commit to collecting everything. It’s definitely worth paying the delivery charges to get things straight to your venue.