Welcome to the Helen Carter Weddings blog. We provide professional, bespoke wedding planning to couples in London, Essex and the surrounding areas, and are passionate about distinctive and stylish celebrations. Our blog is designed to provide practical advice alongside creative inspiration, and we hope you enjoy our mix of planning tips, design ideas and featured wedding services.
Helen Carter Weddings provides bespoke wedding planning throughout London and the South East. We have a wide range of services available, from full wedding co-ordination to venue or supplier sourcing and wedding day management. We’re passionate about creating distinctive and stylish events, and are dedicated to ensuring our clients enjoy a unique, personal and stress-free wedding day.
About Our Blog
We love everything to do with weddings, and we’ve created our blog to share advice, ideas and inspiration. We try our very best to credit everything we show both here and on our design boards page. However, if you see something that hasn’t been properly referenced and you know who it belongs to, or you see something that is yours and you would rather it didn’t appear here, please contact us.
We were delighted to be invited by Nikki of Knots and Kisses to write a blog post for her new look website. In the post we provided brides (and grooms) -to-be with some basic wedding planning tips to help them conquer the months of planning ahead of them. By kicking off their planning process by allocating a realistic budget for each area of the celebrations and by setting easily achievable targets we show how planning your wedding can be an enjoyable experience rather than a nightmare.
Thanks again to Nikki for giving us the opportunity to share her new site, and we look forward to catching up with the other guest blogs she has lined up for future weeks.
Yesterday I shared some behind the scenes photos from our vintage peach photo shoot, and today I’m delighted to show you the video from the day, filmed by Iota Media. Put your feet up with a cuppa for a few minutes and see what we got up to!
Today I’d like to share with you some of the photos from behind the scenes of our vintage peach photo shoot that took place earlier this year at the George in Rye Hotel in Sussex.
With sixty under-twelves invited to our Summer Fete wedding reception, we didn’t need further excuses to plan a sweetie buffet as part of our celebrations. The idea of an old fashioned pick and mix stall also fitted in well with our theme, and so I set about planning the spread. I had browsed the internet for inspiration and found that sweetie tables fell into two distinct camps – the sophisticated, colour themed and very ordered display or the retro, “sweets of our youth” type.
With the aforesaid number of children any elegant display wasn’t going to look that way for long, and also our green, white and red colour scheme didn’t tend to lend itself to limiting the colours of sweets chosen, so I decided that a more eclectic mix of treats was the order of the day.
Back in July I received a message on Twitter from the lovely Rebecca at Chez Bec – did I want to help style and organise the September launch party for her new wedding dress boutique, Isabella Grace? Erm, let me just think about that for all of 2 seconds…YES!
Rebecca kindly loaned some of her beautiful jewellery and head pieces for my vintage peach photo shoot earlier in the year, and I knew she was working on something special from her tweets and sneak peek photos on Twitter. Plus having chatted with her on the phone about her vision for her boutique I knew this was something I definitely wanted to be a part of!
As well as having been involved in some fantastic weddings this summer, we’ve also had some lovely press features in recent weeks. You may have seen our peach photo shoot featured in You & Your Wedding magazine and on Rock My Wedding, but we’ve also contributed our top wedding planning tips to Brides Etc magazine (read the article here), and at the end of August I made my radio debut on BBC Essex talking about weddings in the county. You can listen to the interview here.
I was absolutely over the moon to have recently had my vintage peach photo shoot featured on Rock My Wedding. Some of you may recall that this shoot was also published in the September/October issue of You & Your Wedding magazine, but Charlotte has now shown even more images from this amazing experience, including two previously unseen looks created with our second model Megan.
I had my first grown up sewing machine for Christmas when I was five years old and was the only girl in my school who did A level needlework (or Textiles, Fashion and Dress to give it its proper title), so when our summer fete reception called for bunting (and you can’t have a summer fete without it, can you?), I knew this was going to be DIY project well within my comfort zone. Other factors also meant that hiring it wasn’t really feasible: the fact that I was quite specific on the colours (green, white and red bunting wasn’t readily available to hire), and the sheer amount of it I needed which would have cost an arm and a leg!
I’ve written before about my love of picking up leaflets, so a wedding show is like manna from heaven for me. It was at such an event I first picked up information about having a wedding photo booth, and was immediately smitten with the idea.
We were planning lots of fun entertainment for both the day and evening of our summer fete reception, and had earmarked a reasonable chunk of the budget to it. However, my problem was that I was “immediately smitten” with many of the ideas I was seeing – carousel (must have), ice cream trike (who wouldn’t eat ice cream at a summer fete?), giant garden games (a six foot kerplunk was incredibly tempting) and the cost of hiring a professional photo booth was meaning that a lot of the other options would have to be side-lined.
I don’t profess to be the woman with everything, just the woman with too much of some things, and for that reason, when my mum asked what I wanted for my birthday I couldn’t think of anything I needed that fitted into a space that remained in my house. So rather than give me a beautifully gift wrapped box for my birthday, she presented me with an evening course to learn to make macarons with the winner of last year’s BBC Great British Bake Off, Edd Kimber.
Whilst on the programme last year Edd’s macarons caused something of a stir with their perfection, and recipes for a variety of macarons feature in his new book, The Boy Who Bakes.
Have you ever thought what it would have been like to get married in a pre-internet age? You would have only had a small stack of magazines for inspiration; no blogs to look at for ideas or feel inadequate when reading. No way of sourcing matching doilies, straws and paper napkins (green and white gingham since you ask!), or locating small green clothes pegs, boxing gloves, green sugar mice or old kitchen scales (yes, I did find all of the above for my Summer Fete reception!)
However, the reality is that we do have access to a world (literally) of wedding inspiration, and the savvy bride can use this to their advantage. Many of us have dabbled with Ebay either as a buyer or seller, but many haven’t heard of Etsy, the site where sellers of hand made and vintage items ply their wares which has been likened to a crafty cross between Amazon and Ebay. In addition, there is the wonderful UK based Not on the High Street which showcases the quirky and characterful offerings of over 1800 independent retailers.
Having more than one event makes it possible (a requirement (!)) to have more than one cake. In an earlier post I commented how, despite our tiny guest list for our ceremony, we wanted a cake with presence so that it didn’t get lost in the photos. This led us to adding a third, fake tier so that we could get the look without the calories.
Odd that he is, but my husband doesn’t care much for cake – particularly fruit cake or anything with marzipan or icing. Also, as we had already done the traditional fruit cake for the ceremony, our thoughts turned to alternatives for the Summer Fete reception in June.
