DIY + Inspiration Archives - The Natural Wedding Company

Blog: DIY + Inspiration

Charlie

Wild Welsh summer wedding inspiration with foxgloves and ferns

Charlie

Wild Welsh summer wedding inspiration

When is comes to sustainable, eco-friendly weddings I always look to the seasons and the place where a wedding is to take place. This beautiful wild Welsh wedding shoot organised by Ness of TogetherNess Weddings does exactly that – she was inspired by the hedgerows and meadows in June for this wild Welsh summer wedding inspiration shoot.

“With local and seasonal in mind, I took my inspiration from hedgerows in June hoping to create a sense of hazy summer moments mixed with the bright pinks of our native flowers at this time of year. I hoped to highlight the simple yet exceptional beauty that can be created by combining the talent of local artisan business’s with what our doorstep nature has to offer.”

This wild Welsh summer wedding inspiration shoot is full of foxgloves, ferns, and natural fabrics set against a backdrop of a whitewashed chapel and a meal in a meadow.

Ness used her expert styling skills and collaborated with a small team of talented Welsh wedding suppliers and artisans to create this beautiful wedding shoot. I hope it encourages you to look to the place and season in which you are getting married for inspiration.

TogetherNess Weddings is a Recommended Supplier of The Natural Wedding Company directory. Find out more about them here.

Charlie

Eco luxe elopement wedding inspiration photoshoot at River Cottage

Charlie

Eco Luxe Elopement Wedding

This photoshoot is inspired by an eco luxe elopement wedding held against the stunning backdrop of River Cottage. The photoshoot team wanted to embrace as much as possible the ethos of being eco whilst staying in harmony with the wedding venue. It also features a number of our TNWC Recommended Suppliers – you’ll find all the details at the bottom of the post.

As Laura, photographer at Freeformimage Photography, told us, “A wedding a River Cottage will always inspire and enchant.”

Charlie

Wild Celtic wedding inspiration for a winter solstice celebration

Charlie

It’s been a little quiet on the blog, we’ll have more details to share on that soon. But today we are delighted to be sharing with you this very special Celtic wedding inspiration shoot from TNWC photographer Emma Stoner.

I love the wild and natural styling from Emma Stoner and The Prop Factory. It is earthy and organic, with the most beautiful natural colour palette that reflects the surroundings. For any couples who are looking for Celtic wedding inspiration, this is a truly beautiful styled shoot to give you lots of ideas. These Celtic wedding ideas are subtle, refined, and elegant.

Over to Emma Stoner to tell us more…

Charlie

Favourite Special Wedding Moments: including a breastfeeding bride and the bride who cut up her wedding dress on the day

Charlie

This is the final part of our mini series on featuring our Real Wedding Favourites. If you haven’t viewed the other six parts, you can find them all here, or individual links at the bottom of this post.

Today we are going to round up this series with our Favourite Special Wedding Moments. These are particular moments from the real weddings we’ve featured that really stuck in our minds. Tender moments, a detail that made us feel a bit teary, and even a moment that we found quite scary!

Groom Washes the Brides Feet during their Wedding Ceremony

It’s always lovely to see how couples choose to personalise their wedding ceremony, and this was one of the most tender and intimate moments that we’ve featured. As part of their outdoor wedding ceremony in the French countryside, groom Benjamin washed bride Mariette’s feet as a symbol of his commitment to her.

I imagine it’s not the kind of act that every couple would choose to incorporate into their wedding ceremony. But I love the symbolism, and the moment of quiet and calm that I imagine it would bring to your wedding ceremony. A great reminder to personalise your ceremony and do it your own way.

This beautiful moment was from Mariette and Benjamin’s natural French countryside wedding. Photography by David Blair Photography.

Awesome Breastfeeding Bride

Both Samantha and I have become mums in the past few years, so these images of bride Elena breastfeeding her daughter during her wedding really stand out for me. Elena chose a wedding dress that she would be able to breastfeed her young daughter in and photographer Emma Stoner captured these precious images of the two of them.

A great reminder that your wedding day and wedding dress shouldn’t restrict your personal circumstances, whatever they might be. Make them work for you.

Read the full story at Elena and Simon’s colourful handmade wedding. Photography by Emma Stoner Photography.

Charlie

Favourite Natural Seasonal Weddings: inspiration from spring weddings, summer weddings, and autumn weddings

Charlie

Today we are looking at our Favourite Natural Seasonal Weddings in the sixth part of our Real Wedding Favourites series. You can find all the previous posts here or individual links at the bottom of this post – they are full of wedding inspiration!

We like to champion seasonal weddings so it’s been fun looking back through our archives for some spectacular seasonal weddings to share. There are so many we could have chosen, but we’ve chosen six of our favourites to feature here. You’ll notice we haven’t featured any winter weddings in this post as we haven’t really featured any yet.

If you are looking for seasonal specific wedding inspiration you can find it all here – spring wedding, summer wedding, autumn wedding, and winter wedding.

Our Favourite Spring Weddings

An English Spring Wedding on a Dairy Farm

Caroline and Gareth’s spring wedding on their farm holds a soft spot for me because they got married at the end of May, just like I did. This time of year is one of my favourites, and their wedding captures spring in the countryside, with cow parsley and a lovely palette of pastels pinks and purples.

They used seasonal flowers for the bouquets, aisle decorations, and I love the little pots of cowslips displaying the table names – all named after cows as they live on a working dairy farm. The whole feel of their wedding is so reflective of an English spring, making it my favourite spring wedding that we’ve featured.

Charlie’s favourite spring wedding is Caroline and Gareth’s spring wedding on their farm (part one and part two). Photography by Milestones Photography.

Charlie

Favourite Natural Wedding Flowers: bouquets, buttonholes, flower crowns, wedding hair flowers, and floral arrangements

Charlie

We hope you’re enjoying our Real Wedding Favourites mini series, looking back at some of the loveliest details from the weddings featured on our blog. If you’d like some inspiration do check out the series so far. From bride and groom wedding styles, to wedding ceremony and reception spaces. From beautiful wedding details to some of the most unique weddings we’ve featured.

Today we’re sharing our Favourite Natural Wedding Flowers. Gosh what a hard post this was to create! Narrowing down to just a handful of our favourites was incredibly difficult, because we love flowers. Hopefully this post will give you a taste of what kinds of British grown, seasonal wedding flower inspiration you can find on our blog.

Our Favourite Wedding Bouquets

A Bee-Friendly Wildflower Wedding Bouquet

Miriam was one of our TNWC Real Brides and I loved her passion for incorporating seasonal, locally-grown and bee-friendly blooms into her wedding day. Her wild summer bouquet has always stuck with me, it seems like a genuine representation of the ever-popular ‘just picked’ bouquet style.

It incorporates some really beautiful blooms – blue borage flowers, white cosmos, hot pink honeysuckle, yellow dill flowers, and delicate foxgloves. They all come together in this heavenly meadow-garden bouquet that truly captured the bee-friendly element that Miriam was passionate about.

Charlie’s favourite wedding bouquet comes from Miriam and John’s Scottish 1920’s wildflower inspired wedding. Bouquet by Pyrus. Photography by Photos by Zoe.

Charlie

Favourite Unique Natural Weddings: from a hiking mountain biking bride to a small city back garden ceremony

Charlie

Welcome to the fourth instalment of our Real Wedding Favourites mini series. So far we’ve covered our favourite natural wedding styles, natural wedding spaces, and natural wedding details. Today we’re taking a look at some of our favourite Unique Natural Weddings.

We’ve done our Favourite Unique Natural Weddings category a bit different to the others in our Real Wedding Favourites series. Instead of categories, we’ve just chosen some of our favourite weddings that we thought were a little bit different and unique.

A Homemade Eco Friendly Wedding in Wales

All the weddings we feature have some element of an eco or ethical ethos behind them, but for this category we wanted to choose one who had a really clear commitment throughout all aspects of their wedding.

Jenny and David’s eco ethical wedding stemmed from their love of plants and the Welsh countryside, and they filled their wedding day with elements that reflected that. They chose a fab eco wedding venue, decorated their tipi reception with potted plants, had bouquets of buttons donated by friends, ‘living’ succulent buttonholes, and made their wedding stationery from recycled card.

View Jenny and David’s botanical Welsh wedding. Photography by Emma Stoner Photography.

Charlie

Favourite Natural Wedding Details: favours, table plans, wedding cakes, DIY projects, transport & children-friendly weddings

Charlie

Natural Wedding Details

For the third part of our Real Wedding Favourites mini series we are bringing you are Favourite Natural Wedding Details. As you might imagine, choosing ‘favourites’ in this category is really hard. It’s also a lot down to personal preference. My suggestion is to enjoy browsing through our blog archive for inspiration for your wedding details.

All our picks are chosen from the very first Real Wedding we featured up until spring of this year. You can find all the links to our Real Wedding Favourites here.

Our Favourite Wedding Favours

Hot Chocolate Mugs with a Vintage Welsh ‘Love Teaspoon’

Nik was one of our first TNWC Real Brides and together with her husband Chris they created a true-to-them chilled out wedding at their home. We followed many of the details that Nik created for their wedding, but it was hot chocolate inspired wedding favours that I really loved.

Nik decorated a mug for each guest that they served hot chocolate in at their wedding, and gave the mug along with a vintage teaspoons with the words ‘LLwy Garu’ (Welsh for ‘love spoon’) stamped onto it as wedding favours. Useful and beautiful.

Charlie’s favourite wedding favours come from Nik and Chris’ chilled out rustic coastal farm wedding. Vintage teaspoons from Rescue & Revive and mugs hand decorated by the bride. Photography by Pete Cranston Photography.

Nik’s wedding dress was also one of our favourites, which you can see in our Natural Wedding Styles post.

Charlie

Favourite Natural Wedding Spaces: ceremony spaces, wedding reception decor and a magical wedding venue

Charlie

Natural Wedding Spaces

This is the second in our 7 part blog mini series Real Wedding Favourites. Last time we featured our favourite Natural Wedding Styles (wedding dresses, accessories, bridesmaids dresses and more). Today we’ve scoured the Real Weddings to find our favourite ceremony spaces, wedding reception decor and a truly magical wedding venue.

As mentioned previously our picks are chosen from the very first Real Wedding we featured up until spring of this year. You can find all the links here to our Real Wedding Favourites.

Our Favourite Wedding Ceremony Spaces

I had two favourites for this category and I’ve decided to share them both.

A Wedding Ceremony on a Beach Amongst Chapel Ruins

The first of my favourite wedding ceremony spaces is this ruined chapel amongst the dunes of a Scottish beach. Sounds like something from a film doesn’t it?

Well this is where Jo and Dom had their wedding ceremony. They had a humanist ceremony amongst the ruins on a beach that bride Jo had grown up visiting. It was also where Dom proposed, so it had loads of special meaning to the couple. As if that wasn’t lovely enough, they followed it with a picnic on the beach and a swim!

This was from Jo and Dom’s natural and relaxed Scottish wedding. Photography by Taylor & Porter Photographs.

Charlie

Favourite Natural Wedding Styles: wedding dresses, hair styles, grooms style, bridesmaids and accessories

Charlie

It’s the first in our new Real Wedding Favourites mini series, which will be featuring some of our favourite picks from the Real Weddings we’ve featured over the years. It’s been such a challenge to choose our ‘favourites’, but as we mentioned in our introductory post, these are really just some of our favourites.

Our picks are chosen from the very first Real Wedding we featured up until spring of this year.

Natural Wedding Styles

Today it’s all about Natural Wedding Styles. This includes our favourite wedding dresses, our favourite bride’s wedding hair style, our favourite groom style, our favourite bridesmaids style, and our favourite wedding accessories.

Our Favourite Wedding Dresses

An Asymmetric Layered Wedding Dress

I got a bit stuck on this category because every bride chooses a wedding dress that suits them, and is right for their wedding. The dilemma was, how should I choose? Should I pick the one I’d most like to wear? In the end I was tied between two (this was the other), but Nik’s wedding dress won out for me.

For her Welsh coastal farm wedding, Nik unexpectedly fell in love with this wedding dress from Coast on a shopping trip for bridesmaids dresses. She even told us: “I actually tried it on for a laugh – it looked hideous on the rail and I was going to leave it behind.” I love the asymmetric hem line and layered skirt of this wedding dress, which Nik wore with a thin leather belt.

Looking through their wedding day I just felt that the dress not only looked great on Nik, but it fitted in with their day. Worn with silver flip flops it blended perfectly into their down-to-earth (and very hot!) outdoor ceremony. Later on for their champagne picnic and walk on the beach it worked wonderfully with bare feet. And for the evening party on the farm with a pair of vintage cowboy boots.

My favourite wedding dress comes from Nik and Chris’ chilled out rustic coastal farm wedding. Wedding dress by Coast. Photography by Pete Cranston Photography.

Seasonal wedding ideas:

Spring

Summer

Autumn

Winter

DIY + Inspiration

Real Weddings

Suppliers + Products

Browse the blog:

Planning

Advertise

Get your eco wedding business listed on our directory