our wedding vaab (aka 'decor')

Undoubtedly, the biggest expense and time-consuming thing in organising your own wedding has to be this:
The general vaab.

Flowers, colours, seating arrangements, themes, place settings, music. You spend a lot of processing power thinking about this stuff - months on end.

It's the 'vaab' that drives most brides mental in the end; because they realise they've spent twenty grand on flowers, or they've sat Aunty Ida next to Dirty Uncle Harry and they no longer speak because of an 'incident' that happened in 1985.

The 'vaab' is both the undoing of and the conclusion of a wedding. For everything revolves around it, and everyone wants the best vaab for the best price and something that they can imagine in a spread in Vogue Brides. 

It's what most brides feverishly Pintrest about, and to the point where it should be defined as an clinically-proven internet disease.
Pintrest. All the time. 

The coloured straws. The mini chalk boards with everyone's name on them. The mason jars. ("Must have MOAR mason jars. NEED mason jars. In my life. In my aisle. On my tables.") I am sure I said the above at some point during the process.

Anyway. From the get-go, my feverish dreams were about which colour my bridesmaids would wear and if there was ANY way I could get some red into our nuptials without looking like Chinese New Year. I LOVE red, see. Everything in my life (bar the colours of this blog) are red. Red bike. Red shoes. Red wellingtons. Red red red.

So the Brit and I compromised: antiquey-rose pink (veh veh important. Antique pink. Not candyfloss pink. That would be extremely bad. And I would have a meltdown), with small splashes of red.

I love it when shit clashes. Clashing shit is the best shit.

My savvy mum was in charge of all things bridesmaid - she was in Johannesburg, on the ground, with her bluetooth headset. Well actually, she doesn't wear a bluetooth headset at all, but you know what I mean. Cloth swatches were sent to and fro between London and Johannesburg to try and find the right colour combo and decide on whether the dresses would be chiffony or other.

The flash of red would be our shoes. All girls to wear red shoes! Plus me. Yay!

Anyway. So our colours were vaguely sorted. But as time went on we also incorporated our theme - which for the sake of triteness, I'll entitle 'Vintage Travel.'

We met while travelling, have travelled a lot together and thought, "Well fuck. This theme has basically written itself."

Mixed it up with a few vintage elements to make it weddingey, and bang - you have eight months of conceptualising and theming all worked out.

Vintage elements included things like sparkly chandeliers for the tables, antique roses in small bunches banged into jars and silverware, with twine. Plus a few other things the flower lady bought to the table like watering cans (?) and lots of candles.

I could only see what she had done when I was there, and by then it was too late. Luckily she got most of what I had described to her, and it ended up looking amazing (IMHO), so I was thrilled.
Cranford's barn is really lovely inside - beams and stone, so creating the setting wasn't difficult.

The napkins and tablecloth were white linen, and a simple red ribbon held the name tags. I used vintage luggage tags for the place settings.

I stamped everyone's name, letter by letter on each tag. It took months, and fuck, it was therapeutic. It's what got me through winter. Miss stamping. Seriously.

For our table plan, I ordered a massive old map off the internet. Had this sent to mum's, and she had it mounted on board. Then I ordered the little wooden heart drawing pins from Etsy and stamped everyone's names on larger luggage tags.

I also went cray with the washi tape. I bought a whole bunch of the little bastards and stuck it everywhere. I still have plans to completely washi tape one wall of our a bathroom in our future house. When I'm drunk.

It took a lot of tries to stamp everyone's names so that it didn't look completely retarded, letter by letter.

I put the names of the countries that we had travelled to and met in that had meant the most to us. Weekend breaks to full-on holidays, we named all our tables the countries that had formed our relationship, basically.

Then simply pinned them on.

It looks a bit scrappy, does it look a bit scrappy? Either way, it's ever-so-slightly unique-looking, which I thought was nicely retro.

I then found an awesome website that makes vintage-style postcards. I ordered ones that correlated to our countries - Mexico, Vietnam, France, Tunisia, etc. And used these as table identifiers.

And then found some retro city postcards, and ordered the ones we have been to. Hung these about the room.

Finally, you might've seen my post on the wedding favours I made, which I had the most fun with out of everything. Every one was unique, made from vintage stamps and luggage travel stickers and bound with pink twine. Inside were three types of 'love' tea.

So, there you see, eight months of planning our general vaab. From another country. With no idea how it would turn out or look, right up until a day before. It wasn't quite like how I had imagined it in my head, but I was thrilled.