Welcome along to the next season of Diary of a Boho Bride. Last week I introduce you to the 5 new Boho brides who will be writing for the blog over the next year. Today Samantha is here with her first Diary entry. Today she is gong to be telling us a bit more about her and her finance Simon,  more about choosing their wedding venue, the size of the wedding and a bit more of what to expect from her wedding day.
(You can read more about her wedding story and see the mood board I put together for her HERE)

I’ll pass the Blog over to Samantha………..

Firstly I’d like to say thank you so much to Kelly for giving me the opportunity to write on the blog. I am absolutely loving everything that goes with planning a wedding and this is such an exciting thing to get involved with, especially as I’ve been reading wedding blogs every day since we got engaged! You might say I’m even a little bit obsessed.
I’m excited and nervous to be the first of us to start writing for the blog, but I’m looking forward to us all taking our wedding journeys together – it’ll be lots of fun!
So hopefully I’ve done ok.

A little bit about me…

So not only am I gaining a husband in 238 days, I am also gaining a step daughter. Simon and I have been together since Darcie was 10months old, so I’d like to think our relationship is a lot better than that of the poor girls and the wicked step mothers you see in the old fairy tales (think Cinderella) – though she might say different in a few years time! At the weekends we spend a lot of time outdoors, usually involving puddles of mud and various creepy crawlies. Simon says I have the patience of a saint, but we are a family, conventional or not. And I love it.

I’ve just asked Simon to describe me in three words; his answer was ‘independent, compassionate and honest’. Normally the answer would probably be ‘dippy, emotional and small’ (in fact he’s just corrected me and said ‘you’re very small‘)
Apart from my husband to be, my family is the most important thing in the world to me. I have great friends, enjoy going on holiday and I absolutely LOVE taking photographs. I’ve actually already been pre-warned that I’m not allowed to be seen with a camera on our wedding day – but I might find a way of sneaking one in! (I wonder if they could sew a pocket into my dress??)
I can also natter on a bit, which might become a bit obvious as the weeks go on. It’s good to talk! As they say.

Well enough about me for now and I’ll get onto what I opened my laptop up to write about in the first place…

 

The best things come in small packages?

Or so I’ve always been told, with being so short. But at the moment I’m talking about weddings, of course! We’ve chosen to have a small wedding ceremony of close family and friends and this is for a few reasons.
When we started planning our wedding we wanted to get married abroad in Italy. This would have meant that only a small amount of people would have been able to come and, to be honest, that was such a lovely thought! When we started looking nearer to home for our perfect wedding venue, we based it around either having an outdoor wedding or something a lot different to what we were so used to seeing. And when we discussed the size of the wedding we would like, it didn’t take long to realise we just wanted an intimate gathering of our nearest and dearest so that we both felt comfortable and it wasn’t all so overwhelming.
There’s also the cost. The venue hire is obviously the same whether you have 40 people or 100 for the day, but you have to think about feeding everyone and goodness me that adds up! And talking of food, we have chosen Stables Cuisine as our caterers and their food is absolutely amazing! I cannot wait to eat that meal and can’t recommend them highly enough. (Oops sorry jumped off track!)
Another reason would probably have to be the speeches. Simon isn’t big on public speaking and that’s one of the things he’s been worried about since we got engaged, giving his speech in front of all of our guests. That’s such a traditional and special part of the day I just wouldn’t want it to be a part that he hated. So instead of Simon delivering his speech to a sea of faces that he doesn’t really even know that well, he will only have the eyes of the people we love watching over him – although I’m sure that still daunts him a tiny bit! (I don’t think showing him the video of Tom from McFly singing his amazing wedding speech helped and now he thinks I’m expecting some sort of musical number!) But he’ll do great.

I can’t wait for all of our friends to arrive in the evening to carry on the celebrations and having them there is extremely important to us. It’s not that we don’t want to share our special day with them, we completely want them to be a part of it, we just want to keep the day small and intimate. And how exciting to welcome everyone else in the evening!
It’s hard deciding who to invite to the day and who to invite just to the evening.
But if you invite one couple out of a group of friends, don’t you have to then invite them all to be fair? And then you have your extended family and once you’ve invited various great aunties and uncles don’t you then have to invite their children and so on? I think there can be a lot of pressure to invite people to be polite and not offend anyone, so I think it’s important to just do what you want and invite the people that you are closest to. And after all they love you, they’ll understand!

As I said though every wedding is different, so this won’t apply to everyone, but this is something I’ve heard of a lot. In fact one of my friends said that when they’d come out of their wedding ceremony, they were welcoming everyone into the function room and had no idea who half of the people were – they were friends of their parents or grandparents! And they’ve not seen them since! Madness.

We wanted the complete opposite of most weddings in a lot of ways. I couldn’t get myself excited about a hotel wedding; it just doesn’t seem personal enough. When we were thinking of venues to look at, as soon as you mentioned one somebody would say ‘I know someone who got married there’ or ’I’ve been to a few weddings there’ and that was the same for every place we looked at!
And this might seem completely ridiculous but while waiting to be shown round one hotel, a man walked past me in his scruffs eating a packet of quavers and I wanted to run out of the door! I gripped onto Simons arm and whispered ‘we can’t get married here, we’ll have random people walking round eating crisps!’ It wasn’t just the potential confectionary nightmares though that put us off, there was a crack in one of the windows, terrible carpets and what looked like the contents of someone’s attic on the ‘stage’ in the reception room! You might call me a hotel snob but surely you’d want better for the most important day of your life?

I absolutely love that more and more people are doing things ‘their way’, from woodland weddings to tipi receptions in a field, it’s fantastic! I think weddings were becoming too identical; couples were doing things that they thought were ‘Wedding’ rather than it being ‘Them’. Now if you look at the photographs on wedding blogs and in the magazines everything is so much more personal, it’s so much more exciting! Your wedding is about You, why not reflect that?

We wanted our wedding venue to be different and totally somewhere we could love and that we knew people would get excited by. Somewhere intimate and laid back and that we could have all to ourselves for the whole day. We also knew that a church wedding wasn’t for us.

So on our quest to find the perfect wedding venue, we came across Abbeywood Estate. And fell in love.

It’s not too big, it’s closed to the public on the day of the wedding and it’s not a hotel in any shape or form – perfect! And the grounds are just amazing!
We will have our ceremony and reception in The Glasshouse, a beautiful glass room surrounded by flowers and greenery. It doesn’t really need much decoration but we’d like to put our own personal stamp on the day, which will come in the form of lots of DIY details which I’m so excited to get started on! We’ve got so many ideas from the seating plan to the table decorations – not a giant candlestick or flower arrangement in sight! You don’t have to spend a lot of money to get the perfect look and the decorations will hopefully be as simple as the day is. We don’t want extravagant, we’re not extravagant people. We want it to be a reflection of us as a couple, so we’re not going to be buying things just because they say ‘wedding’ in front of them – what’s the fun in that?!

I’m sure I’ll tell you lots more about Abbeywood in the weeks to come!

So, big or small, your wedding day should be perfect for you and be exactly what you have always dreamed of.

Lots of love Samantha xx

 

 

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