By The Beach Festival: Eat Me, Drink Me (omnomnomables)

Food was always going to be a big part of our Wedding day, we both have families who have generations worth of celebration recipes and we ourselves make a big deal of fresh produce and seasonal food. The same goes for drinks, so we decided on bottles of chilled Corona with lime wedges for our welcome drink at the reception - they always remind me of hanging out with my sister, or uni summer BBQ's with my best mate Dave... I think taste really has a way of bringing happy memories right back to you in an instant, and so much of our menu was designed around amazing memories that are special to us.

Our Welcome drink was Corona with a slice of lime served from tin buckets full of ice! It was lush in the sunshine with a cold beer!

We had Victorian cloudy lemonade and ginger beer for non-alcoholic drinks, and a tin bath full of fruit shoots for the kids

Food glorious foooooood! One thing we were sure of: no 3 course fancy dinners for us. It would be profoundly weird to me to sit in a tent in a field wearing sneakers and listening to Richard Cheese cover Snoop Dogg songs - and eat consomme, or wild this that or the others with veloute and other french frumpery. Don't get me wrong, I love a madly perfect dinner when I'm out somewhere posh but it just wasn't going to fit with what we were planning. 

Dinnertime

Instead we enlisted the services of a family friend from the local area (in fact from a farm about ten minutes from Runswick Bay) called Sally. She, her husband and daughter run a catering business from their home, and bake/roast whole pigs in these huge ovens they have. I don't eat hog roast/pork as such so we settled on Hog roast for everyone else and a bit of roast beef for Trigger (Best Man) and I - as he doesn't eat pork either. Usually with a hog roast, you get the whole traditional bun/apple sauce thing going on, which is lovely, but we wanted to mix things up. We asked Sally if she could go mexican with it and what we ended up with was *stunning*. We had...

Spicy nibbles on arrival (wasabi peas, bombay mix, a selection of crispy things)

Trigger and Beki enjoying some nibbles from Ann!

For mains...
 
Hog/beef shredded on giant trays
Homemade salsa
Guacamole and sour cream
Spicy bean salad
Leaf salads
Mexican slaw (shredded veg)
Cheese
Tortilla wraps
Roast pepper salad and hoummus for vegetarians
New potatoes

We put Frank's hot sauce and bowls of Jalapenos on each table too, so that people could spice it up if they wanted to, and so that nothing on the menu was spicy for those who didn't like it. I guess the main thing to note here is that it was a pretty veggie-heavy menu, fresh and vibrant. Coriander and lime to add to everything and the whole place smelt delicious when it came out. I loved making burrito style wraps on our wedding day, it was proper sharing food which meant everyone was talking and passing bowls around to each other - perfect. Sally and Co. did an amazing job and everyone commented on how good the food was. There was so much left - we took it down to the beach the next day so everyone could have hog sandwiches!

One of the tables, with some of the side dishes on it

Some salads and fresh salsa

Shredded slaw, mexican bean salad

mmmmm....

 Dessert

Instead of having Sally do our desserts, we asked a few family members to make some cakes for us and we bought squillions of sweeties from Makro and make the most decadent sweet/cake table ever. It looked like a wicked child-eating witch should preside over it. I'm pretty proud of how it turned out, considering the only plan for it was in my head! My Mum made two cakes that looked like flower beds (and matched the table flowers) from Granny Louise's fruitcake recipe, Alex's Mum made her amazing raspberry Sachertorte, my sister made loveheart cookies and Alex's sister Amy (of The White Rabbit Bakery) made some incredible cupcakes that look like/are shaped in Ice Cream cones! They were so perfect for the seaside! My sister also picked us up a couple of extra shop bought cakes to add to the party...

 

Mum's cakes, made to Granny Louise's fruitcake recipe...

...decorated to look like the table felt flowers!

We decorated the tables with ice-cream sundae runners, paper doilies, Mum's flowers and an array of cake stands picked up from places like Ikea and TK Maxx over the last year or so. We also had a couple of tiny kitschy trays with 'Wedding Day' painted on the side that my Mum found in a charity shop! Oh and some seaside stuff too, like a fishing style net and some glass floats. The jars were a mix from Yorkshire Trading in Whitby, Ikea and also Mum's terrarium jar which was filled with flumps!

Jars of sweets, giant marshmallows and amazing cakes

om nom nom!

We had Giant Strawbs in our sweetie collection (my family always used to get them from Aunty Pat's cafe down by the beach), rock from Whitby and Drumsticks (Al's favourite) as well as heaps of massive American marshmellows on sticks. We did intend to roast these over the fires, but when the tents turned up they had to change the fuel so that the tops of the Tipi's could stay shut, so no roasting. Oh well, they looked awesome and people still ate them!

The tiny lacy baskets you can see were made by my sister, she set lace doilies into a cup shape using glue and a jam jar (I think!) Rach also stamped all our sweetie bags for us

We also popped a candy-necklace on each table place, when we were little we used to bite them in half and ping them at each other (actually they're kinda dangerous when you think about it) and sure enough, halfway through dinner they were whizzing all over the place and people were ducking and diving with grins on their faces! 

Evening Food

Probably the first thing we decided, is that on our wedding day we wanted to have fish & chips. Whitby fish is the best in the country so we went on the hunt for a Fish & Chip van for the evening. We were introduced to Matthew and Vicky of Whitby Seafish Ltd and their amazing van 'Winnie' (huge thanks to our caterer Sally for that!). They served up cod goujons and delicious chips with really interesting array of sauces (I liked lime mayo best) overlooking the bay in the evening. It was brilliant to see everyone munching away on hot fish and chips in the cool night, and there was always a little queue for the van!

Alcomoholic Beverages

After table wine and a lot of bubbly delicious champagne (thanks Mum & Dad, especially so for hiding a bottle of champagne - we've saved it for our Anniversary), it would have been rude not to hit up the amazing bar serving Yorkshire's finest World Top Brewery flavours. We wanted to keep as much as we could local to the Runswick Bay area, and the lovely folk at The Runswick Bay Hotel (Simon and Co.) sorted us out with a bar, glasses for the whole event, ice, beers and spirits and some very fun-loving staff too! They all had a wristband on by the end of the night, and some even had a cheeky trip to the photobooth too ;)

Two of our fantastic bar staff in the photobooth! <3

 

By The Beach Festival: Grand Entertainments, Photobooth Madness & Stuff for Squids

One thing we knew when we started this escapade, is that we primarily wanted it to be FUN for everyone. Down with decorum! Huzzah!

Games

Knowing that we'd be having Tipi's in a field as our reception location, we crossed our fingers for decent weather and bought... spacehoppers. With a little bunting and some garden canes these became tools for epic inter-couple races/small arguments, a kid war-zone and a great source of mirth and funny photos. We also grabbed a couple of diablos and poi for people to chuck around and a mini rounders kit that we had in the attic. We really should have known better - our families and friends are rather competitive sorts and within an hour of dinner finishing there was the most almighty and raucous game going on and rather funnily - men in suits and women in pretty dresses, shouting mild obscenities at each other and legging it wildly around the field. It was fantastic! We did have a box full of board games for indoors in case the weather turned but luck was on our side for the whole day.

As cheerleaders the world over will know, there is never a time or place where it is definitely inappropriate to stunt. Hell I bet somewhere sometime there will have been stunts at a funeral too. I think my stunt group had been secretly waiting for this day to come for a while - to get me up in the air, when I'm usually a base, firmly attached to the ground (the lovely lovely ground) but I thought hey, I trust them... the nearest hospital is flippin miles away... but I trust them! ;) So this happened... #cheerwedding

Auditory Entertainments

Music makes our world go round! Yeah so everyone was expecting us to have bands I'm sure, but honestly - it was just too much hassle. We'd have had to sort out a stage area and loads of other equipment, it's miles away from anywhere and didn't know any bands in the area. It would have been a headache. Luckily we know some pretty amazing people, and it just so happens that my BFF is also a superstar DJ by night. Dave lent us his mixer and snazzy speakers (and by lent I mean, took all the way there, set up and looked after them for us... thanks dude) and we just plugged in my Kindle, popped on the Spotify playlists I'd spent hours carefully curating, and away we went! With Spotify, you can 'download' playlists to use offline on their Premium service which is perfect. I made one for the daytime and one for the evening, you can wrap your ears around them here:

Daytime Playlist

Evening Playlist

I loved loved loved that so many people enjoyed our music, especially as we have friends and family from all walks of life who might not have liked the same stuff. There's a pretty eclectic mix on there though, take a look! The funniest of all was the guy behind the bar who couldn't believe a wedding had good music, and was dancing and singing the whole night - he may just have *exactly* the same taste in music as me haha! There were a few gems chucked in there that remind me of certain people too, like Reef 'Place Your Hands' which was my cousin Abby & her husband Pete's wedding song, 'The Safety Dance' which is an inside joke for my brother Diefenbaker, relating to a crap film we love called 'Biodome', Muse for DJ Dave, The Prodigy's 'Omen' for the cheerios, Basement Jaxx 'Bingo Bango' for my brother-in-law Ade and loads of others. Music always sparks memories for me, people, places, times, feelings - I think that's probably why it plays such a large part in our lives.

Stuff for Squids (Children for you normos)

We knew that we didn't want to make things difficult for our friends and family with small children, and a long weekend at the seaside is too good an opportunity to pass up right? So we tried to do our best to make sure kids were catered for, from putting as much info in the invitations as we could, making sure they had their own ice bath of fruit shoots for a welcome drink and putting together some activity packs with stuff for them to do. 

There were two babies who got RNLI bears to snuggle as part of their packs, and the bigger kids had floral crowns and pirate hats, sea-safe activity booklets, seaside identity wristbands for use the next day, bubbles, spinners, a bucket and spade each for playing on the beach and the most awesome colouring pages which were hand drawn by my Mum. They had scenes of Runswick beach, rock pools with crabs and even the Tipi tents on, she drew them all then we printed enough copies for everyone! We popped in packs of colouring pencils and some sea-themed stickers, and handed them out at dinner, it was great to see the kids racing around in their floral crowns and pirate hats, getting into the festival spirit!

THE EPIC TALE OF THE PHOTOBOOTH DEBAUCHERY

Is how it shall be known for ever more. If I posted the pictures here, my blog would be quarantined into the soft porn section of the internet. My friends are awesome. So somewhere along the line, a challenge was issued, and more and more uncovered bits of people got papped in the marvellous Picabo VW campervan. Bless them, but bro and sis team Will & Georgie were really brave in the face of so many shrieking cheerleaders! They didn't mind that the photos were coming out lewder and ruder each time, they didn't even mind when 11 people crammed into the tiny van for a photo and they brought a fantastic array of props - some of which have seen things they shouldn't. Here's a couple of the nice ones instead...

Photo from Picabo's facebook page, of their beautiful camper photobooth in front of our Tipi's!

Reviewing some of the naughty photos

Props

By The Beach Festival: Crafternoon and Makeables

This wedding was definitely a team effort with lots of people getting involved. This is my homage to all things 'made' at the many crafternoons and late night creative soirees that occurred. We're all fairly crafty sorts (in both families) and after drooling at things on Pinterest and Offbeat Bride (whose fabulous book and site inspired us to DO WHAT WE WANTED instead of what's expected - many thanks for that, and if you've never read that book, buy it!) we made quite a lot of things in the end.

Hangables

Woah but this was a big project. We did buy some from various shops but it's the made stuff that really raised the game of our decorations. My Mum worked for weeks on handmade puffed hearts (fabric ones with lace and ribbon, and ones made from old mapbooks), hand stamped card ones and my very favourite - a whole string made from old lace doilies and handkerchiefs. Alex's mum worked with gingham and pretty fabric (one bit had mermaids on!) and they all came together in a delightfully kitsch and vintage mix up of styles.

Alongside these we bought loads of different sized and coloured paper pom-poms from Deco Pom Poms (a cheeky nod to cheerleading there!) to hang from the ceiling, Many hands helped us to get these all fanned out beautifully and it was by no means easy. They were strung across the centre of the tipi's using fishing wire from one of my Dad's rods at the cottage, so they bobbed about in the wind too. They were just so cheery! We were never going to be able to nail down a proper colour scheme for everything, our world is bright and exciting and full of colour, and the decorations just made me happy!

The absolute icing on the cake though, was the incredible banner that my Aunty Dot made for us. She stitched and knitted and noodled and whatever else incredibly crafty people do - all the way from her home on Unst in Shetland to Runswick Bay! She was crafting on buses and ferries all over the North! We hung it up right above the dance floor and it looked amazing!

Table thingers

Probably the thing I had clearest in my mind, was how our tables would look. Shabby chic, vintage and kitsch all rolled into one. I picked up table runners every time H&M had a sale over the last year and a half, and we collected glass pots from all over (dessert dishes from vintage fairs, goblets from charity shops, low containers from Nu puddings, funky glasses and tea light holders from Ikea) to house a multitude of little flickering tea lights that looked like a sea of lighters at a festival ballad at night.  Oh my Mum stuck pretty lace and ribbon around all of the plain ones to beautify them, and at the end of the night my Cousin Jo, my Sister and I were drinking champagne out of the random candle dishes and goblets - mine was called 'The Chalice'... I don't know why...

We picked out interesting books from the ten-bob-barn at The Book Farm (some very funny trips with my Mum giggling at old book titles) and lace ribboned them into stacks for centrepieces, and then I used the vectors and fonts again to create our table name cards. These were all named after areas or stages at Bestival (our favourite festival ever!) and they were held up using some pastel coloured bulldog clips I got from ebay, with some lace tape stuck over the sides and the handles removed - it's super easy and looks cute, I think I saw it on Pinterest!

Instead of putting place-cards on each spot (I was worried if the wind blew through the tents, they'd all get scattered) we thought of putting tags on all of the chairs. We took brown label tags, the kind Harry Potter would put on his school trunk, used an acrylic stamp of lettering and music scores to loosely print onto them, scoured facebook and family photos for funny pictures of each guest (much mirth when everyone tried to find their seat) and stuck on tiny shells we got from the Rainbow Shells shop in Whitby, along with their photo and name. It took aaaaaages, but we knew they'd be fun.

These were the tags before they had the funny facebook photos and names stuck on them, I just used superglue for the tiny shells and nearly all our guests remembered to take them home which is nice!

Also on the tables was a floral handkerchief in place of a napkin, we used them to make a little pocket for the cutlery, a tiny flag and a paper straw each - everyone loved these and asked if they could keep them, expecting them to be fancy/expensive ones or that they belonged to the catering company, but actually they were another great ebay find! A few origami cranes I made also dotted the tables, in Japanese legend if you make a thousand origami cranes or 折鶴 orizuru, you may be granted a wish by a crane. I didn't make a thousand. I didn't even make a hundred. But I think they're lucky regardless!

The very best and most special things on the tables though, were the flowers. Yep, you heard me, flowers. My Mum painstakingly made hundreds of felt flowers so each table could have a beautiful posy in a little vase. Each one had a tiny button or pearl in the centre and some of them were even made from her own hand-made felt. They looked to me like the fields of wild flowers we saw on trips to France, they felt like memories and they were the first thing everyone mentioned to me. I love them.

Invitations & Branding

Yep, branding. I knew once I'd created the original images for our invitations that it would be easy to create everything in the same format, giving it all an identity. Whilst I don't much go in for matching stuff, this did make things easier. I just stuck to the same vectors and the same fonts across the board to make stuff like the table names, the lanyards and the wristbands.

Wristband design

Facebook banner

Invitation poster

Sticker/plectrum logo

So our invites were designed by me, but printed by John E Wright Printers in Leicester and the proper festival style tickets were printed by Hot Ice Printing, also in Leicester (they have proper tearable sections with foil on!) and we wrote essential postcodes and phone numbers on the tear-off section of the tickets so people could put them into their purses for the weekend. The card invitations themselves were from Pocketfold Invites and they have loads of colour/paper/size/orientation options, but we chose toploading pockets so we could put tonnes of info in. Again, Mum helped me get through all of these, even cutting all the info sheets down to size as they were a bit big for the pockets!

Info sheets (where/when/how/what to bring/hotels and cottages/gifts etc) Oh and our RSVP was a little Tipi, guests were asked to take a photo of them somewhere special or to craft up the tipi somehow and email it to us, at our Wedding email address. If you've just got engaged - set up an email account straight away! It helped us to keep track of everything and keep company contacts in one place, as well as providing a way for guests to contact us easily.

We used mini paper doilies for the front, along with a patterned paper slide printed with a key to hold it closed. Inside the papers were created to be different sizes so that only the top banners showed in the pocket, the 'poster' was stuck in the centre section and I turned printed plectrums/guitar picks (which were printed with the tipi logo above) into mini fridge magnets using a pack of cheap flat magnets from ebay and a glue gun.

I took a google image of the area and from it drew a cartoon map for the invitations as well, which doubled up for use on the back of the VIP lanyards. You can just about see it in the top left of the card inserts picture, but I won't post it here because it has personal information on it, sorry!

The table-plan board followed the same format as everything else for it's name cards, and my Mum & Dad created the board itself, using a picture frame and some pretty floral fabric - cool huh?

On our sweeties/cake table, there were also printed paper bags for putting sweets in (my sister went stamping mad on these as the thought of doing so many was hurting my brain) and I had cross-stitched a 'love is sweet' picture which was in a frame shaped like a beach hut. Rach also did all of our chalk boards, which pointed the way to the loos, what the schedule for the day was and various other things.

One other brilliant idea we got from some internet searching, is the 'finger-print guest-book' (we did have a normal guest book too, but having been to lots of other weddings, know that they don't always get filled in too well). We opted for a little couple silhouette holding balloons to be filled in with our guest's fingerprints, but you can get trees and other pictures too! I love that there's a tiny fingerprint from little Florence on there, so cute! Sorry about the picture quality - I took it on my phone and then it went through the facebook mangle as well, but the picture is lovely and sits proudly on our living room wall, reminding us of the most perfect day!

One very special section of 'made' things that I don't have a picture of, is the huge collection of hand-knitted blankets my Mum made. They are so beautiful and cosy - and they were put into our giant steamer trunk next to the dancefloor, so that if people got cold they could just cuddle up in a blanket and get warm again. Mum made loads of them in different colours and a really amazing white sewn one that had these rips in the front that show through rainbow colours!

Alex's Mum also made an awesome clutch bag for the day, which was silked and sewn and sequinned by herself - and it even had two A's embroidered on it for Anna & Alex! I was also given a really beautiful traditional lucky horseshoe at our ceremony, which my Mum handmade. It's covered in pearl and lace embellishments with touches of blue - you can see it best in this picture,

I'm sure there's more I've forgotten... I'll just add it to this post if I find more pictures!