How To Have A Beautiful Wedding

When we came back from our first travels it was with a wonderful addition to our relationship- an engagement! We knew we couldn’t wait long before tying the knot because we were too excited so wanted to do it as affordably, but beautifully, as possible. We gave ourselves just over 1 year of saving and planning for the perfect wedding. We knew we wanted it to be outdoors in Italy for the weather and scenery, most likely in the region where my family is from, but that was about it.

-> UPDATE: Sam is now a wedding photographer! If you would like your special day shot in a timeless, editorial style that tells an evocative story (and captures you in your most beautiful light!), check out his Luxe Wedding Photography Services here.

In the end, we had a truly magical wedding weekend that was every bit as idyllic and romantic as my Pinterest dreams could have possibly imagined, and then some! Below, I’m going to outline some of the tips we learnt along the way to show you how we created our own fairytale wedding for exactly £10k.

Have a small, off-season wedding

We opted for a September date so it wouldn’t be unbearably hot, and things would also be slightly cheaper. If you can, try and go slightly off-season. This will also mean less competition if you’re like us and tend to leave booking things to the last minute haha. A March wedding is also great for this. Another big factor is the size of your wedding. The bigger you go, the more it’s going to cost you. Not that you should slash your loved ones from the list just to save a few pounds, but just bare this in mind when you’re thinking about the guest list in the beginning. Ultimately you need to do what you feel is right for you.

I’ve always wanted an intimate wedding, but even we could see how quickly the numbers can go up once you start adding plus ones! In the end we had just under 60 of our nearest and dearest attending. If possible, having less than 100 people will help you cut costs but don’t uninvite people for that reason alone!

black and white outdoor wedding confetti throwing

groom kissing bride’s hand black and white

Take advantage of what you have

The second tip is undoubtedly to leverage what you’ve got. I’ve never been a fan of traditional wedding hair and makeup so asked my mum and sister to do the honours. Is there anything your bridal party could help you with? Obviously, this only works if you know people with special talents, but definitely ask around- you never know who your friends of friends will know. Then, we also asked my cousin if he would kindly be our DJ for a couple of hours. We had a cozily sized venue so a simple stereo and iPad playlist were more than enough to get us all up and dancing well before the second course came out!

If you’ve got a beautiful garden, why not use that as your reception venue? Or your best friend is a baker? Ask if they would like to contribute with the cake instead of a gift, if not I’m sure they’ll at least give you mates rates! Weddings are a wonderful time where people are happy to come together for a demonstration of love, we found more often than not people welcome the idea of helping out. We loved how involved everyone was for our wedding because it made it that little bit more special and unique for us. Of course, always ask kindly and take someone’s answer as final.

just married white fiat cinquecento and sunglasses

DIY To Your Limits

The next tip is to DIY what you know you’re comfortable with. Don’t drive yourself crazy, especially if you’re not already an avid DIYer. Particularly because in the long run those extra pounds you save might not even be worth it, or could end up costing you more if it goes wrong. Planning a wedding can be stressful enough as it is, you don’t want to add unnecessarily to it. Having said that, our wedding planning was pretty much totally stress-free and we did A LOT of DIYing ourselves! We did have to muck down and call on my sister for help when we were still cutting IKEA lace curtains in half for the table runners and stuffing lavender into hand-calligraphed paper bags a couple of days before the big day though haha. We also made our own wedding invitations and Save The Dates.

Although we loved the experience and are pleased to have something we poured our sweat and blood into, we probably didn’t save money on them in the end and the whole process took a HELL of a lot longer than we originally thought! Doing your own invites from scratch is not for the faint-hearted. Plan any DIYs well in advance and be prepared for setbacks. If you like, you can also get rid of physical STDs altogether and use digital versions. We did both and went with Paperless Post for the online ones, they have loads of design options and are relatively cheap.

Also in this regard: Etsy is your best friend. I found loads of little touches on Etsy that made a big difference, particularly for the day before-and-after decorations. I even bought our wedding bands on there! I also bought my wedding necklace and headpiece. I was so so happy with this because we went to several jewellers and I just couldn’t find something that suited our style (especially for the wedding rings as these are something we’re going to wear forever!), this is especially useful for you if you have slightly alternative tastes, and is also another great way to cut costs!

For ideas in general, Pinterest is obviously your holy grail. If you want to DIY some of your wedding, here’s where the ideas will come from. Think in advance how much money more or less you’d like to allocate to what and how intricate you’re happy with certain things being.

For example, I wasn’t happy paying £300+ for a wedding veil I was going to wear for 20 minutes, especially as I wanted something super simple. So I decided to make it myself with my grandma. But, the whole process from finding the correct fabric to cutting and securing it was longer than many instructional blog posts made it out to be! In the end though I was happy with the outcome and the money I saved.

Another thing we DIYed was the place tags for which we collected stones from the river and Sharpied the names on. For the favours, I bought crystals in bulk and hessian bags on Amazon. I also made the welcome bags. Often with DIY, it’s a lot of different projects that add up to make the saving considerable, as opposed to simply one DIY, so this is another aspect to take into consideration if it’s for you or not.

One final thing that was a major help for me in the DIY department was Canva. It’s a great tool for building visuals- I used it to make our Save The Dates, invites, welcome pack (with itinerary, map etc.), favours, menus, all our signs (such as for the confetti), and thank you cards.

Let The Natural Beauty of Your Location do the Talking

One of the biggest contributing factors to the look and feel of your wedding will be the location, so really take your time picking the perfect one, for us the love was instant. If you can have an outdoor ceremony and reception most of the work will already be done for you with its own natural beauty, meaning you can save on the flowers! In total we spent just under £500 on our wedding flowers.

That was for my bouquet, ceremony arch, boutonnieres, flower crowns and table runners. For the rest of the ceremony decorations we used carpets from IKEA (which will also be your saviour) for the aisle and two olive trees from our own garden that I dressed with offcuts of my veil, and aluminium buckets for the lavender confetti bags. Then we draped some tulle around the tree we were under and used an extra IKEA lace curtain to dress the officiant’s table, plus a grey runner on top and our initials (all things of which we still have and use). Which brings me to my next point:

Repurpose what you have. Our ‘getaway’ car (i.e. to take us from the ceremony courtyard up the hill to the reception restaurant) was my uncle’s! We simply took down the fabric from the tree to dress it up a bit as everyone was making their way out. Plus, fairy lights and candles go a LONG way in making a space look magical.

Italian vineyard outdoor wedding reception

Pick Your Must-Haves, Minimize + Multitask on Everything Else

Another major tip is to shop around. This goes for anything from your wedding dress to your cake baker. The more quotes you get the better you can make an informed decision, and maybe even haggle a bit! Some of our biggest expenses were our photographer and videographer (about £800 and £600 respectively), my wedding dress (£1150) and Sam’s suit (£1100). These were the things we had decided we wanted to be totally happy with no matter the cost. Ladies, this definitely goes for you- do not stop shopping until you are 100% happy with your dream dress. You’ll never have this day again so the extra search to be totally content with what you buy is worth it. I visited 9 shops in total!

I tried on so many wedding dresses but I immediately fell in love when I tried my dress on and needed practically NO alterations (except asking my grandma to take off the wrist cuff buttons and add them to the back zipper)! I was so happy in it, I never wanted to take it off. In fact, I stayed in it until 5 in the morning and even washed my face and brushed my teeth before undressing so I could wear it that little bit longer haha. I had also planned to sell or rent it afterwards but it now holds so many beautiful memories for me I couldn’t possibly imagine doing that. I’m already looking forward to our 10 year anniversary to renew our vows so I can wear it again! But, this could be an option for you to make some of your money back.

young newlywed bride and groom outdoor Italian wedding lace dress cheers

On the other end of this spectrum is to compromise where possible. Some things just simply won’t be possible (budget or not), but in the end I can guarantee everyone will be too busy having fun to notice, as will you! Plus, people won’t know how something was ‘supposed’ to be if they never saw the other option. For example, we had to have a standing ceremony because hiring chairs was just too prohibitively expensive. This worked well for us because it wasn’t a religious service so didn’t last too long, and it was a small wedding so people could roughly stand where they wanted without it getting too messy (we used pinecones to delineate areas a bit). It really depends on what your must-haves are and your personal preferences.

I’ve never liked the idea of throwing a bouquet and didn’t think my bridesmaids needed their own either due to the simplicity of our style (plus I never understood why they have them in the first place- maybe this is just an American tradition?). So this was something we technically saved on. Ultimately it comes down to what you truly want and what is important to you and your partner- the wedding industry (and Pinterest!) is very good at making you think you need All The Things when really all you actually need is each other, your guests and an officiant :)

If you can, multitask. We held our reception in a restaurant so there was no venue fee, we simply decided on a menu and service price altogether. It also meant one less vendor to deal with. We paid about £4000 for food and drinks (just wine and grappa). We were in a vineyard so this made sense for our bar. Being in euro everything works out a little cheaper when converted as well but mainly not going for a ‘wedding location’ was the biggest factor in savings. These types of places will often charge heavily so if possible stay away (whilst bearing in mind that you also won’t have their expertise and experience so again need to do what’s best for you!). This also counted for our ceremony location- being in a very local spot, far from tourism, it cost us only £90 for the use of the municipal garden!

To track everything I used The Knot. This was really great for me to visually see all that we needed to do (and put me at ease when I saw the percentage of things done going up!). They also have a custom wedding website feature which was a really nice way for helping to lay things out clearly for our guests. If you’re having a destination wedding this is something I would definitely recommend.

Save on the Honeymoon

And finally, this one may be pretty controversial and definitely not for everyone, but consider not having a honeymoon. At least not straight away. Of course, for many brides this may be one of the main things that you’re looking forward to, but for us, the wedding was the be all and end all. We already travel a lot and didn’t feel the need for another holiday straight away, particularly because it was already a destination wedding in some respects. The reason I say this is because that way all the money you save and receive as gifts can go directly into your wedding fund. We asked for donations instead of a gift registry, if our guests felt like giving something above their presence.

Plus, I didn’t feel like planning something else just yet! We used Wanderable for the wedding fund, and although it won’t go towards our honeymoon just yet, when we’ve managed to save again that’s when we’ll go for it. Along this vein, we also didn’t consider our hen and stag dos as part of the wedding budget. This was because we accounted for the fact that under normal circumstances we would go on holiday at least once a year anyway and saw it simply as that, moneywise. If it’s better suited to you, perhaps you could ask your bridesmaids to cover this for you instead of a gift? Again, you have to do what feels right for you and your wedding party.

bride and groom newlyweds walking in Italian landscape

So that’s everything we did to have the most beautiful wedding of our dreams for under £10k! It truly was the best day of our lives, as the cliche goes, and one we will most certainly remember forever (in fact, we STILL frequently talk about it to this day)! We hope this post could be of some service for you to see where we spent our money and some of the ways in which we saved, and to show you that it’s possible to have an affordable wedding that’s still like a Pinterest fairytale :)

If you’re getting married, we’d love to hear about how your planning is going in the comments section below!