Matrimony Boulevard Blog

Summer of weddings!

noreply@blogger.com (Chichi) — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 22:57:00 +0000

Can't believe it has been over a year since I have blogged here. So much has happened in my life from moving house to having a baby. Life has definitely changed!

Maternity leave is coming to an end and here at Matrimony Boulevard it is time to get back to talking about weddings and events.

This year a number of my peers tied the knot, so it was a summer of weddings. One of the weddings I attended included a helicopter landing!

Did you attend any weddings this summer and what were your best bits?

Choosing your Wedding Cake

noreply@blogger.com (MB) — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 17:21:00 +0000

Today is a featured vendor post, by Beth from ‘Cakes by Beth’

I have always been a creative person and have been making cakes for family and friends for as long as I can remember. A simple cake was never enough, I always had to put own stamp on it and add that little bit of extra detail to make it special. I was getting so many requests for cakes and so many people were asking how they could get hold of one of my creations that I decided I needed to take it to the next level and so I set up my own bespoke cake business, Cakes by Beth. Based on the principle that nobody should suffer in the making of a good cake, the ingredients are locally sourced, seasonal and Fairtrade wherever possible.

I pride myself on the fact that all cakes are designed from scratch and hand crafted by me so that the happy couple get the perfect cake for their big day. There’s no better feeling than when you’ve set up the cake in the venue and you know that it will make a beautiful centrepiece that really reflects the couple, plus everyone will want to step closer to get a better look. An excited crowd always gathers around the cake so it’s a key talking point.

My style is clean, simple and contemporary but with a little something special that makes my cakes beautiful and unique. I like to use flowers in my designs, but in a way that you can’t find in nature, so scattered blossoms in interesting shapes, sparkling petals and larger than life blooms. I also find wallpapers, fabrics and vintage jewellery incredibly inspiring. There is nothing more beautiful than an intricate edible brooch on a cake, gorgeous!

So where to start?

The sky is pretty much the limit with what style and type of cake you can choose, so where do you begin? I find that the number of guests attending your wedding is a great starting point because it determines the size of your cake and the effect it creates. It’s also really important to consider the type of venue you plan to hold your reception in. A grand building calls for a grand cake, whereas a more contemporary space could suit a more quirky approach.

For larger and more formal weddings, a stacked cake can be perfect. You can serve everyone and create a tall and stunning centrepiece that will stand out amongst the crowd. For an interesting twist, why not have double height cakes on some of the tiers? This adds interest to the cake’s profile and means you can really show off hand painted details and beautiful piping. Round cakes are softer and more feminine, square cakes are more structural and angular, plus serve slightly more people. Either shape can be stunning but one may fit in with your theme more. For instance, lots of soft pinks and scattered petals would really suit a round cake, whereas a black and white theme would look fantastic on a square cake.

This may all just be too much cake for you to know what to do with, especially if you are opting for sponge, which doesn’t store as well as fruit cake. Smaller and more informal gatherings really suit towers of cupcakes and mini cakes. Plus, if you’re really watching the pennies and are unsure about stretching your budget to a cake, these little treats can double up as the dessert at your wedding breakfast. The cakes can either be formally served to guests or they can help themselves from the display for a more laid back approach. I recently created a cupcake tower for a marriage vow renewal ceremony and the “help yourself” option went perfectly with the fantastic buffet of authentic African cuisine.

Another alternative is for your cupcakes to be individually boxed up and given as edible favour for guests to take home and enjoy later. I find that this works really well as the bride and groom can present each cupcake to the guest as they leave, giving them an opportunity to thank them personally for coming.

How to choose your decoration

Your cake can be a way of expressing yourself and adding a touch of your own personality to your wedding, without veering away from tradition in too big a way… unless you want to, of course. A lot of people are happy to have lots of bright colours and quirky details on their cake but wouldn’t feel comfortable with these on their dress or in the wedding venue. I like to design wedding cakes that aren’t so much “novelty” but unique and personal, incorporating elements of your day. You can take inspiration from all sorts of places, from flowers to wallpaper to jewellery. Elements of your wedding dress or the colour of your bridesmaid dresses, plus flowers from your bouquet can be incorporated into your cake and really tie everything together. Think about the venue, the view, the time of year, the style of your invitations, your shared love of a particular hobby, even how you met your other half. These elements can cover the whole cake, be featured in the cake topper or as small, subtle details within patterns and decorations.

If you love a particular pattern or design but think it might look over the top for your event, why not opt for a single colour cake? This can be all white, all ivory, different tones of soft pastel or something more unusual. The detail will look fantastic but as everything is in the same colour, the overall effect will be one of stunning simplicity. More elements of your wedding colour scheme can then be subtly included if you wish, in the form of a ribbon or an arrangement of flowers on the top.

Sugar and fresh flowers both look fantastic on a wedding cake, either as whole blooms or a romantic scattering of petals. They can be laid out on the top, scattered down the side, spiralled around the cake or arranged between the tiers, all to stunning effect. I would never mix fresh and sugar together though. If you want fresh flowers on your cake, it’s best to consult your florist first as some flowers are toxic. You want your cake to stay edible and look stunning throughout the reception so it’s best to get expert advice.

Tasting as good as it looks!

Everyone has a flavour of cake that they love and so your own favourite can be a great choice for your wedding cake. If you’re not sure, a lot of cake designers offer tasting sessions so that you can get a feel for how your cake will taste on the day. After all, it is meant for eating so this is as important as, if not more than, how it looks. You can even opt for different tiers in different flavours, although I think this could be a bit messy if you incorporate too many flavours so would recommend that you choose your favourite two.

A simple but ever popular option is a vanilla sponge with jam and buttercream, an absolute classic. I think a really nice touch that is always well received, is to match the jam inside with the decoration outside so that the whole cake works together, such as hot pink flowers and raspberry jam, or purple ribbon and blackcurrant jam. Imagine how pretty the slices look as they are served to your guests! Some people are concerned that if they have a white cake, they may not be able to have chocolate inside, but this combination is absolutely fine. The only thing is, if your cake is covered with chocolate, it is best to have chocolate cake inside.

The combination is rich and delicious.

Overall, my advice for choosing your perfect wedding cake would be to think about how you want the mood of your wedding to feel, pick out your favourite elements about your big day or you as a couple and above all, have fun! A lot of aspects of planning a wedding can be very serious and stressful so choosing your cake should be your chance to enjoy yourself and create something beautiful and delicious for your special day.

Check out Beth’s website for more information and to see more pictures of her fabulous work. All images in this post are cakes made by Beth.

Wedding Monograms

noreply@blogger.com (MB) — Tue, 17 May 2011 03:37:00 +0000

Monograms are a great way to give your event a ‘brand’ or ‘logo’ and can be used on your invitations, programs or even wedding items.

When designing a monogram we work with the client to understand the style of their event, what colours they wish to incorporate and then provide a selection of styles for them to choose from.

Below is a monogram set designed for wedding last year.

This one went on the wedding invites and programs.

This one was designed but not used by the couple.

This was used for the reception:

…on the Candy Buffett!

***

Fonts used:

Freebooter Script – our names in the last monogram

High Tower Text – all the main text

Fleurons {Dingbat} – for the image behind the ‘E’ in the last monogram. It is lower case ‘m’

Edwardian Script – for the swirly ‘E’

We do more than weddings!

noreply@blogger.com (MB) — Sat, 14 May 2011 16:06:00 +0000

Here at Matrimony Boulevard, while weddings are our main type of event, we do cater for other social functions.

Celebrating a birthday or anniversary milestone?

Looking to host a Bridal shower or launch a product?

Whether it is a small intimate dinner or a party for many, we can definitely assist.

Birthdays
Bridal Showers
Anniversary parties
Launch parties
Corporate events

Drop us a line to discuss how we can help you!

Image {source}

Choosing a wedding photographer

noreply@blogger.com (MB) — Sat, 07 May 2011 20:53:00 +0000

When we got married last year, our wedding photographer was one of our important vendor choices. You only get married once and your pictures will last for a lifetime, so you want them to be right.

We chose Jide Alakija from Alakija & Co who was not only creative in his style but fun to work with as well. My husband and I had complete trust in what he was doing and were really pleased with the results.

As a thank you I wrote a guest post on his blog on 'How to pick your Wedding Photographer'. If you’re at that stage and are looking for some handy hints and tips, this post is for you!

Hop over and enjoy!

Image {source}

Ethical Supplier Pledge

noreply@blogger.com (Chichi) — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 09:22:00 +0000

Sometimes when you're looking for companies to work with, you're not sure who to go for. What standards do they work by? What ethic code do they follow?

I believe it is important to know. After all you are entrusting them with one of the most important days of your life.

Here at Matrimony Boulevard we have signed up to the Ethical Wedding Supplier Pledge, a initiative launched by the wonderful English Wedding blog.

As a wedding supplier who has signed up to the pledge, we promise to:

Never charge more for a wedding than we would for any other event.
Care about customer service and make shopping with our company a pleasant experience for brides and grooms.
Openly offer help and advice to brides and grooms.
Recommend other suppliers when our own order book is full.
Never badmouth another wedding supplier.
Recycle and minimise waste as a lifestyle choice for our business.
Respect other businesses’ copyright and intellectual property.
Follow distance selling regulations (including showing full contact details on our web site).
Engage in friendly competition and network with fellow wedding suppliers.
Share advice with new wedding businesses if they ask for help.

We're proud to display this badge!

Guest Lists

noreply@blogger.com (MB) — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 17:30:00 +0000

So the Royal Wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton has 1900 people on the guest list {and I thought the 500 we had for our wedding was a lot!}

I can only guess the conversations between Will and Kate about allocations:

Will: So you can give your parents 300 and I’ll give mine 400

Kate: No I think 500 would be more appropriate

Deciding your guest list is a crucial part of the wedding planning process as it will influence your budget, venue and catering.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to deciding the guest list:

Option 1 - write a list of all the people you would like to attend your special day and then look for a venue to accommodate them all

Option 2 – decide on where you would like to host your wedding and work backwards with your numbers, to get your guest list to fit

There are pros and cons for both and your budget will ultimately influence what you decide to do. The more people, the bigger the venue, the bigger the costs.

Managing your guest list

At the beginning you may find it a good idea to set up a spreadsheet which will house all your guest list information. As you collect names and addresses, send out invites, receive responses etc you can use your spreadsheet to confirm things and stay organised.

A easy way to collect names and address from your guests if you don’t hold them already is to send out an email with a link to a site which can capture the information for you. Wufoo and Google Docs are both really useful in this area. You essentially set up the contact form, with all the information you wish to collect, send the link to your guests and then every time some one completes the form you will receive an email with their details. You can also export all the information you collect into a spreadsheet as well, so when it comes time to start addressing invitations you have everything you need. Simple!

How are you organising your guest list?

Picture {source}

Keeping The Wedding Costs Down

noreply@blogger.com (MB) — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 18:04:00 +0000

I love receiving mail from my readers and I recently got a lovely email from my reader, Kunbi who is getting married….

I've been a keen visitor of your blog and I love it...always advertising to friends. I'm engaged and my fiancé & I have started planning our wedding. I know you said you were going to write stuff about wedding but could you talk about finances as I know nothing about what to save towards. Could you give estimates? e.g if i want a wedding for 300 people in UK, what should we be aiming for? or how can I find out. Many thanks and I pray God continues to bless your marriage. AMEN

Firstly congratulations on your up coming wedding! One thing to know is that every wedding is different. Some people have got married with £2k and some have spent £20k. It all depends on your budget and how much you are prepared to spend.

Everyone tells you to sit down and work out your budget first but this can be really difficult if you don’t know how much things cost. We had over 500 people at our wedding and didn’t have a first clue about how much a wedding of this size would come to.

The first thing I did was download a budget planner {Wedding Chaos has a Wedding Budget template you can use}, this was so that I could identify the areas where we would need to spend money for the wedding. I then began to do research about the costs of different things using the internet, making calls and speaking to other brides and newlyweds. Once this was done we were able to compile our budget. We then compared this to funds available and tailored it accordingly.

Breaking it Down

The biggest expense you will face on your big day is your venue and/or food/drink. They typically come to around 40-50% of your budget. As your venue is central to proceedings if you can find an affordable venue, it will really help with your overall budget. I know people who got married in their local church and had their reception there has well, as they had a big hall. Cost – zero as it is their home church, so it really depends on your circumstances.

After that you will have things like your attire and photographer which again their prices will depend on what you go for.

It’s hard to provide estimates for things because price is reflective on what you go for and where you live {London is far more expensive than Manchester say} but I can give you some tips which helped us. One of the best pieces of advice given to us was, was that we should come up with a list of things that are non-negotiable. These are things which you must have/include in the wedding. The reason for this is that when it comes to having to make choices about particular things you know how far to budge. If it is a non-negotiable then you fight for it, if not you can let it go. Also remember that nothing is yours until you put down your deposit as in most cases this confirms your booking.

Another thing is about expectations and comparisons. Every wedding is different. Every bride and groom are different. It can be very easy to get sucked into a Wedding Industrial Complex and start to feel like you must have ‘x’ or ‘y’ because you have seen on The Knot or Martha Stewart weddings. Those places are great sources of inspiration, but that is what they should be…inspiration. If you’re starting to feel that your wedding won’t match up or is inadequate, requiring you to spend more money than planned, stop reading those magazines and blogs because your wedding is about creating the day unique to you and your fiancé.

So without further ado here are my tips on ways to save money planning your wedding:

1. Design your own wedding stationery or get someone who can*. It definitely saves you money when you have a lot of guests. I designed all our wedding stationery from 'save the dates', invites, wedding programme and thank you cards and got them printed locally.

2. Utilise the internet. You can get some great deals on everything using the internet. Ebay is especially good for things (picked up coloured envelopes really cheaply on there) as well as sites from overseas if you have enough time to wait for the items to come.

3. Don't forget the obvious places. We got some fantastic items from Ikea as well as local thrift stores. My wedding planner was very financially savvy and picked up some great bargains that we use to decorate the hall.

4. Negotiate with your vendors. My husband and I agreed that whatever price a vendor gave us, that would be our starting point to work down. This was not because we did not value their service, far from it. We had a budget which we wanted to stay within but valued the skills of certain individuals and wanted to work with them. In those cases we stripped things away from the original package quoted in order to keep the price down. For our photographs for instance we just booked Jide to shoot our wedding and provide the photos on a disc rather than the whole album package which we can always do at a later date.

5. People are very talented. People will offer their help, accept it. Our cake was gifted, our DJ was free. Our wedding rings were a gift and our Videographer was free. You might have friends who are skilled in certain areas, don’t be afraid to accept their help.

6. Cut out the un-neccessaries that don't matter to you. Focus on the things that are important to you as a couple. For us that meant not using real napkins, real flowers or having boutonnieres for the men.

7. Skips the favours. Controversial? Maybe. Save you money? Definitely. If you can avoid to give out favours great if you can’t it won’t take anything away from your wedding. We didn’t have favours but we did give gifts to the people who bought the ase-obi.

8. Look out for deals. Slaters where we hired the suits for the men had an offer that if you hire so many suits they give you one free. That helped bring the overall cost of the suits down.

9. Be prepared to think outside the box, especially when it comes to venues. Had our numbers been smaller like yours, our choice of affordable venues would have dramatically increased. We discovered that a lot of schools and Universities have fantastic great halls at affordable prices. Speak to them about what they can offer and be prepared to be visionary and think about how you can transform the place.

10. Use your own caterers. One venue we saw which was available for our date wouldn’t let us use our own caterers and wanted to charge £55 a head to make their version of Nigerian food! Even after hosting a Nigerian wedding recently and receiving poor reports about the quality and authenticity of the food, they still refused to allow us to bring our own food. So we said goodbye to them. This will definitely save you money than going thorough your venue and you can control the menu.

11. For decoration be creative. Visit craft stores for inspiration. Hobbycraft is very good for this.

12. You don't have to purchase all you bridal accessories from the same store. Feel free to tap up Etsy where there are lots of creative people who make great items. My bolero was made by the lovely Joy Kelley of ‘How Joyful’ who has her own blog and Etsy shop. Don’t be afraid to buy things from overseas (point 2) as the exchange rate can work in your favour.

13. If you have time, purchase wedding items as and when you see them rather than the last few weeks before the wedding as you can grab some bargain in the sales.

14. Get married in your local church {or the local church of a close relative} as they won’t charge you or charge you as much.

16. Bridesmaid dresses: You can either get your girls to purchase an outfit from the high street {my friend Mel got a great bargain on Coast dresses as she bought them off season} OR buy some fabric you like and get a seamstress to make them for you. Either way it works out much more cost effective. If you need a good tailor in Manchester, drop me a line.

17. Make use of the great technology around. We hosted our wedding on mywedding.com and with that we were able to set up online RSVP which gave people the opportunity to respond to us quickly. We used wufoo to collate everyone’s full names and addresses {you can also do the same using Google Docs). Both of these things didn’t cost anything and as they say time is money, so anywhere you can save yourself time is also of benefit to you.

Hope this helps Kunbi!

Useful Links

Money Saving Expert

Frugal Bride

Confetti

I’m sure other people have great money saving tips for weddings, please feel free to add your suggestions in the comments.

If you have your own wedding questions, please drop me a line.

* We can provide any assistance in this area. Please get in touch.

{Picture source from here and Jide Alakija}

Hello!

noreply@blogger.com (MB) — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 17:35:00 +0000

Welcome to the first ever post on the new Matrimony Boulevard blog.

Here you will find information about what we do, recent work and wedding related tips as you plan your big day.

Matrimony Boulevard specialise in:

Creative design - wedding invites, save the dates, menus or programs etc

Event Coordination

Check out our website for more information!