London Wedding Planner

Well we’d done things a little unusually by not inviting any of our friends (and hardly any of our families) to our wedding ,so we wanted to carry on doing things a little differently for the big summer celebration party as well.

The first hint our guests would have of what we were planning would be the invitation. I was mindful that there was likely to be quite a lot of information to include (details of what was going to happen at our “wedding without the wedding”, information about our alternative wedding list, and sign up details for the children’s creche), and so looked at pocket-fold type invitations to house the multitude pieces of paper. In addition, I wanted to bring in the Summer fete picnic theme we had decided on and so set about trawling wedding shows and the web for inspiration.

Although I found some fantastic designs featuring carousels, fairground entry tickets or billboard fonts, nothing quite clicked and I was slightly put off by the £5 plus per invitation price tags I was seeing. Then browsing through one of the many wedding magazines that had started piling up to precarious levels at the side of the bed, I came across The Original Wedding Tea Towel Company and I immediately fell in love with the concept.

The idea of a tea towel linked in beautifully with the afternoon tea picnic we were planning and with the bespoke design option we could aim for something which hinted at the other elements we were planning for our day. An added bonus was, that even with the bespoke design fee, the towels came in at a lot less than paper invitations, as well as being a lovely keepsake for all the guests.

So I got in touch with the lovely Karen Brown, owner of the company, and set the design process in motion. I explained the details of our day and chose white (rather than natural colored) cotton towels with a beautiful fresh green print. After a couple of small tweaks of the design (which included a Punch and Judy show, thus inspiring another entertainment option for the day and sending the ever-calm Helen scurrying off to source one for us), the towel was sent off to be printed, and then a courier delivered them a couple of weeks later.

We were really chuffed with the finished product and I set about putting together the other information we wanted to include with the invitation. To tie all the parts together, I also asked Karen to supply us with a .jpeg file of elements of the design so that I could use my rudimentary Photoshop skills and a lot of patience to put together matching information sheets, reply cards and mailing labels.

Then started the task of assembling the invitations. I tied together the paper sheets with a couple of strips of fairground tickets I had sourced on Etsy and a strip of photos from our wedding ceremony and then wrapped the whole lot in the tea towel and tied it again with red and white baker’s twine.

The towel was then parcelled up in brown paper, tied with string and labelled (in true “Oliver” style one of my favourite things is receiving a proper brown paper parcel!).

With the additional inserts, each parcel cost 93p to post, and in keeping with my old fashioned theme I refused to let the lady behind the post office counter to give me sticky postage labels and instead spent 40 minutes in the post office licking and sticking real stamps to the 65 parcels (four to each one!).

Nursing a swollen tongue, I then sat back and waited for the responses to arrive. Before any of the formal replies dropped on our doormat I was being stopped in the street by grateful recipients who were blown away by the parcels and thrilled by the tea towel. There were also a number of emails from friends who said that it was the best invitation they had ever received.

The wonderful product from Karen and her company had successfully set the scene for what was going to be a fun and fabulous day and would act as a great keepsake of the day as well for the guests. However, I must admit I was somewhat saddened to see one hanging soggily from a friend’s oven door the other day, though I must say her wine glasses sparkled beautifully!

Just after I placed my order with Karen, Helen got in touch with her to find out what inspired the fantastic Wedding Tea Towels and wrote a great blog post outlining her designs and the reasons why you might choose a tea towel rather than a paper wedding invitation. Check back on the HCW blog next week to find out what’s new in the world of Wedding Tea Towels as we put Karen in the spotlight.

In Sarah’s Thoughts next week find out  how I managed to plan a hen day which could be enjoyed by ladies aged from 7 to 75 by incorporating something that appeals across the generations – chocolate!

Photo Credits:
All photos by Sarah Nendick

You might also find interesting:

• Mad About…Wedding Tea Towels
• The Original Wedding Tea Towel Company – What’s New
• Sarah’s Thoughts – Alternative Wedding Cakes
• Invitation and RSVP Management