More Delightful Details of our Flamenco Styled Wedding

Last night we shared this fabulous Flamenco styled wedding with you and here are some more of the wonderful details we created to style this wedding.

The bridal bouquet was actually a last minute order as Anna had wanted a fan but when we arrived with it she changed her mind, we had to be honest expected this so had plan b up our sleeves! Sometimes this does happen if a bride sees something but in reality it does not work. We knew Anna liked stargazer lilies so created a red rose and stargazer bouquet and the bridesmaid was in ivory roses with red alstromeria. Andrew´s buttonhole was a red rose to match Anna´s bouquet.

We created personalised fans decorated with a thin black ribbon and a paper red rose detail, always useful to keep the guests cool at the ceremonies here in Spain and styled the wedding stationery in fan shapes using the black damask detail and red rose theme.

The table seating fan shaped cards were hung in the courtyard and the menu cards were created to match.

The table linens were our black and white damask style linens and worked beautifully with the white chiavari chairs.

The centrepieces were storm lanterns with white candles and red sand and we sprinkled some red rose petals in, the principle table also had a gorgeous floral display surrounding the storm lantern and we finished off the tables using red tealights and spanish ceramic tiles for the table numbers.

We thoroughly enjoyed creating this wedding and are thrilled with the results and would like to congratulate Anna and Andrew on their beautiful wedding day and for allowing us to put our creative hats on!

Our thanks again to Andreas Holm´s for sharing these photographs with us and as I always say without these wonderful suppliers we work with we could never create such fabulous weddings or show them to you :)

Spring Wedding in Sotogrande

Our 2011 weddings started off with a beautiful spring wedding at the Hotel Almanara in Sotogrande. Despite a slightly cloudy and overcast week the sun came out at lunchtime just in time for a late afternoon ceremony in the gardens of this charming hotel.

The colour scheme was spanish orange mixed with a chocolate and I have to admit I was slightly worried about this colour scheme for a spring wedding being such autumnal colours, but having arrived at the Hotel Almanara it all fell into place as the linens were all chocolate and coffee coloured.

I could now see why our bride and groom had picked the oranges, lemons and limes it just lifted it and tied in and the end result was fabulous.

This wedding was one where the bride and groom had been ingenious and worked with what the venue had to offer and really worked hard on the details, I had received parcels, strict instructions :) and lots of details to put together for the day and we were delighted with the end results.

My favourite part of the day was watching the ceremony begin and our bride dancing up the aisle to her H2B, it was truly magical and a moment that will stay with me for a long time :)

Here is our email a few days after the wedding

Thank you for everything, our decorations looked amazing, you did a fantastic job, thank you for the beautiful, stunning bouquets I am looking at them as I type this. They are drying out and getting ready for the album. Good luck with all your forthcoming weddings and big hugs.

I love the photo of Fi decorating the cake, the aisle lined with hurricanes filled with dried rose petals, the beautiful Bali umbrellas that photograph so well and on this occasion we had a ceremony sand set set out with orange, chocolate and cappucino sands, apparently these got mixed up on route back to London but this is what a marriage is about, a mixture!

Our thanks to Mireia for sending us these delightful photos and our warmest congratulations to our charming bride and groom and thank you for being our first wedding of 2011 :)

Using local Spanish flowers for weddings

This is a post I have been meaning to do for quite some time, eversince I read an article in one of the top UK wedding magazines, You and Your Wedding, about a beautiful wedding at the Hacienda San Rafael here in Seville, the article was called Hacienda Highlights and featured the wedding of Sara and Luke.

I am going back a while as this editorial was featured in July/August 2009.

The part of the article that horrifies me shows a photo of the bride's bouquet, which is quite pretty, with the wording as follows "my mother in law picked the flowers from the gardens at the venue".

I am then racking my brains as to what Mediterranean flowers could have been picked that a) would have survived and b) would have made a pretty bridal bouquet, I could not think of any, so when I examined the photograph again I realised it was a bridal bouquet made out of Oleander, which is one of the most poisonous flowers in the world......?!

Oleander grows everywhere here in the Mediterranean and needs little looking after, you will see it all along the motorways and it is indeed pretty but lethal, every part of this flower and plant is toxic from the leaves to the flowers. There is even a book called White Oleander about a wife that tries to kill her husband by wiping oleander on the door handles of the house, causing a slow death!

I was gobsmacked and emailed You and Your Wedding to ask them to warn future brides of the hazard of using this particular flower but disappointingly I have not even had a response from them, which I think is rather remiss to be honest of the magazine to publish articles about this sort of thing and then not correct features that perhaps are either misleading or downright dangerous.

This leads me onto these fabulous photos found on Snippet and Ink of a beautifully styled wedding but again using pink bougainvillea for a wedding bouquet is misleading.

Bougainvillea will start to wilt within about 5 minutes of picking it, unless it is plunged immediately into lots of water and stays there, so to use this for a wedding bouquet is a complete waste of time unless you want a sad pink droopy bouquet!

It is fine to use for table centrepieces as it will be sat in water, and it is pretty to use to scatter on tables, as even though it immediately wilts it still can look ok as table scatter or napkin decoration, but for a bridal bouquet, forget it, it also has very nasty thorns so by the time you have picked it, removed all the nasty thorns so you can hold it you will be left with a droopy mess :)

Whilst I adore these inspirational magazines and ideas, I do wish at times they would be slightly more practical and not send out the wrong or even dangerous messages.

I would be very surprised if the bride or the mother in law in the Hacienda highlights feature weren't unwell using this flower for decoration. It is one I will not even have in my own garden with my children and pets around.