Planning My Own Budget Wedding - Twice Over! Part 1

Weddings have always captured our imagination as being romantic and so it’s hard to imagine that getting married may become a thing of the past, if you can believe what the latest news predictions are claiming.

Imagine, no more wedding gossip about the perfect wedding dress, elaborate celebrity weddings, outlandish wedding themes, or complaining about how bad was the wedding feast. What would we have left to talk about ladies?

I for one would hate to see weddings go out of fashion any time soon. You could say I’m a wedding fan, having had two weddings of my own, been married twice, and to two different husbands. The weddings were nearly exactly ten years apart and both very different. Here is how I planned my weddings on a small budget with some tips on how to save money.

First Wedding

My first wedding was when I was 23 and I didn’t know much about weddings except that my sister got married the year before me and I helped to organise it, so I knew what was involved.

My parents paid for most of my first wedding which allowed my fiance and I to save for a lovely tropical honeymoon. I decided on yellow and cream as my colour scheme and used doves and cherubs as the main elements.

Wedding Invitations

I am an artist so I had a lot of fun creating my own unique wedding invitations.  So I decided to make scrolls for the invitations and tubes to put the scrolls in. I used mottled yellow cardstock to cut out scroll shaped background sheets and then lightweight cream paper for the text which was pinned to the backing with a thin yellow ribbon bow and gold cherub stud. I made a tube out of the card stock to use to carry the invitation.

I tied a piece of thin yellow ribbon around each tube and then typed up name and address labels which I glued onto each tube.  As most of the guests were local I could hand deliver or get other people to deliver the invitations for me without having to pay for postage. For interstate guests, I folded the scrolls and put them in envelopes to be posted.

Wedding Ceremony
The wedding ceremony took place in a church and the reception was held in the hall next door. 

Catering

It was a self catered affair with just over 100 guests and several family and friends helped out with preparing and serving the food and beverages. My mother prepared the menu and then she and some of my aunts cooked the food either the day before or the morning of the wedding.

My father hired a keg with a tap for the beer and then organised for a friend to manage it on the day. We also had wine, punch and soft drink and champagne for the toasts and then we had tea and coffee after the wedding cake was cut and served.

My family also helped to decorate the hall and set up the tables and chairs. We used white tablecloths. Cream and yellow balloons were tied together and placed around the hall.

The catering equipment such as tables and chairs, tablecloths, crockery, cutlery and glassware were all hired from a catering company.

Wedding Cake

My aunt was a cake decorator so she offered to make and decorate the wedding cake. We just paid for the ingredients and the cake topper. The icing was white with tiny yellow and cream flowers as decoration.









Wedding Music
We had the minister organise one of the ladies from the church choir to play the wedding music during the ceremony which was included in the ceremony fee. We didn’t bother with flowers or decorations for the church as it was such a lovely church, it didn’t need any.

The reception music was put together from music collected from family and friends and included dinner music and then dance music for afterwards. 

Wedding Photography

My godfather was a photographer enthusiast and so he offered to do all the wedding photography and get the photos developed for us.

Wedding Flowers

My mother and I both had florist businesses so we made all the bouquets using silk flowers and arranged small bouquets of fresh flowers for the table centerpieces.
                                                                                                              


Wedding Transport

The wedding cars were borrowed from friends who had a couple of classic silver sedan cars.







I hope my personal wedding planning journey on my first wedding gives you some inspiration and tips on how to organise your own wedding on a budget. But wait, there's more to this story, my second wedding was very different to this one, to see how I planned my second wedding, read "Part 11".