Our Wedding Part 3: Dinner, Dancing & The Photobooth

Hello lovelies,

Thanks so much for stopping by to read our wedding story. In case you missed it, here's a link to our inspiration board, Part 1 and Part 2.

Our Photographer

Our wedding day photos were taken by Hannah MacGregor and her assistant, Abbie, of Funky Photographers. Not only is Hannah super talented and creative, she was an absolute gem from our first meeting to our pre-wedding shoot, where she helped us to feel at ease in front of the camera {usually by making us laugh!}.

On the day itself, Hannah was wonderful with our bridal party and guests. Zee and I wanted to spend as much time as possible with our guests during the reception so she suggested we sneak out during dinner, before the speeches, to take some couples shots. This worked really well because it meant the exterior of Grove House and the grounds were not full of people, just us newlyweds. She even interrupted her own dinner to take the photos ~ she’ll go to any lengths to get ‘the shot’! We are absolutely thrilled with our photos and have been recommending her to all our friends and family.

Cake:

The cake went from being a 4 tier square based royal iced cake with roses between each tier {too expensive}, to a 3 tier round cake with ornate piped icing to look like lace edging {too fussy} to a 3 tier round cake with messy buttercream icing and scattered blush pink roses on each tier with a posy on-top {just right}!

Joanna, our cake maker, from Cake Magic did an amazing job with the messy icing, and the sponge was delicious. However, buttercream looks pretty BUT it only lasted 2 days so we threw out practically the whole cake, which was heartbreaking! If we'd given the guests goodie bags to take home it would have worked much better.

Personal Touches:
Zee designed our beautiful wedding website for guests to find out more about how we got together and info about the day itself. Since the wedding, we’ve used this same site to post our photos and wedding film.

Zee also suggested we send email invitations via Paperless Post. This was an eco friendly and time saving option-as we had a list of those attending/not attending/yet to reply all in one place and we could write messages to all our guests to keep them updated. It was a stroke of wedding planning genius on Zee’s part! {Check out my post on Paperless Post here.}

As Zee is half Iraqi, we wanted to include some Arabic touches on our big day. We bought large white Morrocan Lanterns and filled them with candles and placed them on the terrace tables. As a further nod to Zee’s Arabic roots we provided Baklava {Arabic pastries} and mint leaf tea on the coffee/cheese/dessert table.

Unfortunately we don’t have any photos of the Arabic touches or the dessert table but they were there ~ honest! In fact, we have the beautiful Moroccan lanterns dotted around our living room.

Mr and Mrs

During the speeches, Zee’s brother and our MC for the day, suddenly veered off schedule by asking us to take our shoes off and give one of our shoes to each other…we thought he was joking! But he insisted, and surprised us all with a game of Mr and Mrs. We had to stand back to back and hold up the bride or groom’s shoe to represent our answer and were then asked a serious of questions such as ‘Who is the most romantic?’ ‘Who made the first move?’ etc. needless to say we had quite a few different answers!

{This went down a treat with the guests ~ it was such a good idea!}

An Impromptu Speech

I gave an impromptu speech! I just became overcome with emotion and wanted to say thank you to all our guests, to our parents and to Zee. As I hadn't prepared anything, it was not the most eloquent speech but it was heart felt and I'm so glad I did it. Why should the men do all the speeches anyway? I can speak for myself thankyouverymuch!

Entertainment

I simply loved the idea of having a photobooth with loads of fun props at our wedding to keep our guests entertained and give us {and them} a fabulous keepsake of the night. We paid extra for the photobooth to take double prints, one for our guestbook and one as a favour for our guests. Zee wasn’t as keen, he felt it was too expensive and an unnecessary expense because we had a professional photographer but he agreed it was well worth it when it went down an absolute storm!

You'll be pleased to know, that Zee ate his words and whispered those three beautiful words every girlfriend/wife longs to hear ~ ‘you were right'.

Zee and I laughed our way through the photo guestbook the day after. The photos were in chronological order so they got sillier and sillier as the night went on! We looked into a few photobooth companies but the quality of the Boothnation photos was truly amazing, as was their whole service from designing our poster, to manning the booth/guest book on the night to the beautiful leather album.

Here are a couple of the snaps! The great thing is, they were {and still are} all online on Booth Nation's website for guests to see.

Our First Dance:

Zee and I always thought our first dance was going to be Al Green’s ‘Let’s Stay Together’. It felt like his greatest hits album was on repeat during those first few months when we were falling for each other, back in our uni days. However, two days before our wedding, we decided to have a practise run in our bedroom…and thank goodness we did! We just looked and felt SO awkward because it’s such a jaunty song-it calls out for cheesy clapping and finger clicking…not very romantic!

So we opted for Otis Redding {another soulful singer we both adore} and his exquisite song, ‘These Arms of Mine’. As a result, we both felt much more comfortable slow dancing while all eyes were on us. We cunningly requested ‘You’ve Got the Love’ by Florence and the Machine as the next track so we’d entice lots of guests onto the dancefloor for a boogie and take the spotlight off us ASAP!

{If you're interested, you can read my guest post about our wedding music over on the fabulous, music inspired wedding blog Soundtrack To I Do}

Hey DJ:

We hired a DJ for the evening and provided him with a Spotify playlist of all our favourite ever tunes which we enjoyed adding to in the months leading up to the big day. Our eclectic wedding playlist was full of Otis Redding, Prince, Kings of Leon, Micheal Jackson, Lady GaGa and Bon Jovi! It Rocked!