by Liz Baker Photography | Wedding planning
Wedding planning: trend or tradition?
Wedding planning trends suggest traditions are out, or at least at an all-time low. Couples planning their wedding in 2019 celebrate how they want, eat what they love, wear what they like. And quite rightly so.
But wedding plans can draw inspiration from time-worn traditions. And some couples may treasure a particular tradition for reasons personal to themselves.
Unique to you
Perhaps you’re ready to throw out the father of the bride’s speech. Maybe you’d love to abandon cutting the cake (or chuck the cake completely?). Or do you even stand on the brink of buying a black wedding gown?
It can also be fun during your wedding planning to consider the history of some of the more old-school aspects of weddings. In the end you should of course go ahead and choose what actually suits you in the 21st century.
Something Blue
“Something Blue” is one surprisingly enduring tradition that still features in many couples’ wedding planning. It has survived through frequent adaptation over the years to remain a popular touch for many brides and their families.
It is one of four things that brides were to wear on their person on their wedding day. Almost 150 years ago, folklore thought to originate in the Northwest of England told that these four things would bring luck, prosperity and a successful marriage:
Something old,
something new,
something borrowed,
something blue.
Fifty shades of blue
According to the custom, something blue represents faithfulness. It was often the garter which was blue, but more recently the tradition has been to sew a ribbon or scrap of fabric inside the wedding dress. Meghan Markle wore a blue dress on the blind date where she met Prince Harry, and later famously had it sewn into her Givenchy gown.
Blue shoes have been popular over recent years, and general pops of blue in the details of a wedding design have become a classic, iconic look. Grooms have joined the fray with their own Something Blue bowties, socks and suits.
It may be that after all, blue is such a good accent colour that this is a custom worth adapting. So take care not to throw out the blue baby with the tradition bathwater! Here are a few stylish ways to incorporate something blue into your wedding…
Don’t forget, you can get my guide to planning your own fine art wedding sent to you completely free, along with your no-obligation, personalised quote.
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Groom’s blue tweed suit
Delicate blue Nigella (Love in a Mist) in a bridal bouquet
Pale blue crockery for the table
Suited in blue
Blue letterpress wedding invitation
Blue wedding car
Sapphires in the engagement ring
by Liz Baker Photography | Wedding planning
Botanical wedding theme
A botanical wedding theme works so well within the context of fine art weddings. A couple of years back, Pantone named Greenery as their colour of the year, cementing an already burgeoning trend.
Never out of fashion
It’s not hard to see why foliage and botanicals will never really go out of style. It’s a well-known fact that the colour green has a relaxing, pacifying effect. No doubt due to it being the chief colour in nature’s own beautiful palette. Of course it’s also an elegant palette due to its clean simplicity.
Laid-back & natural
If you’re considering a botanical wedding theme for your wedding, read on! You’re in the right place to view my curated selection of images from over the years, and follow the links to the specific galleries. There’s a varied approach to the style here. But the common thread running through is a laid-back, natural look. Just as if you scooped up some wild, exotic leaves and fruit and scattered them across your scene.
Go green
Olive leaves bring elegance wherever they are used. Succulents work all over the place, even in addition to/in place of centrepieces. These are foliages with those dusky blue/grey undertones which speak of warmer climates. Closer to home Rosemary grows abundantly in the UK and carries its own delicious scent, working well alongside/instead of eucalyptus. Consider other foraged greenery on arches, tables and chair-backs. Trailing ivy on window sills is always an English stunner in my book. And how about asking your florist to create a statement wall or area of floor?
It’s all in the details
Olive leaves & ferns in tablescapes and stationery bring flavour from further afield, as do figs and fig leaves, grapes and other fruits. When it comes to botanical wedding themed stationery you’ll be spoilt for choice. And with the right photographer you can look forward to some beautifully styled photography of your details (think, rings, invitations, perfumes etc). It will be completely in step with your botanical wedding theme, just make sure you keep her up to date with all your design plans as they unfold!
Get my guide to planning your own fine art wedding sent to you completely free, along with your no-obligation, personalised quote.
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by Liz Baker Photography | Bouquet preservation, Wedding planning
the botanical bouquet
MODERN ICONIC FINE ART PRINT
Introducing…
A new UK wedding bouquet preservation service.
I am delighted to be the first to offer brides & grooms right across the country this modern UK wedding bouquet preservation option. The Botanical Bouquet offers UK couples the opportunity to preserve their wedding flowers as a luxury fine art print. The Botanical Bouquet is an authentic, contemporary approach to preserving your bridal bouquet, inspired by a love for iconic botanical illustrations of the past.
The oldest illustrated sketchbook is traced to a Greek botanist during the first century AD. The practice has never gone out of fashion since, booming across Europe during the Georgian and Victorian eras.
Today the tradition continues to thrive, through watercolours, paper sculpture and glass art. We are thrilled to join the botanical art movement, with hand-crafted surfaces, finest pigment inks and pure cotton papers.
So how does it work? Well, all it requires is a little extra planning and care with your bouquet. Don’t worry, detailed instructions are included in the brochure (request yours here). But in a nutshell… stand your bouquet in water whenever you can on your wedding day. Then, the next day, separate the stems, wrap them in damp cotton wool and post/courier your flowers to me.
I take care of the rest of the process, and you receive your beautiful fine art print by special delivery as soon as you return from honeymoon! I carefully arrange the varieties from your bouquet, using linen boards hand-made in a Somerset bindery. Then I photograph and annotate your design, before ordering your archival quality print on 100% cotton rag.
The Botanical Bouquet print is available to brides throughout the UK. Simply send me your wedding date and browse the brochure. Then choose your surface, mount and any extras. Click here to check if your date is available and receive the brochure.
The Botanical Bouquet Fine Art Print
by Liz Baker Photography | Inspiration
Demelza
Poldark
The Spirited West Country Bride
Poldark wedding inspiration with excerpts from Winston Graham’s novels…
“Ross Poldark is not a novel which ends with a wedding, like Jane Austen. It’s the first of twelve novels about a marriage, which lasts the rest of their lives. The sudden, shocking, unconventional marriage of Ross and Demelza is at the heart of this magnificent, beautifully written series of books.” Tim Vicary
“And Ross again knew himself to be happy
– in a new and less ephemeral way than before. Someone — a Latin poet — had defined eternity as no more than this: to hold and possess the whole fullness of life in one moment, here and now, past and present and to come. He thought: if we could only stop here. Not when we get home, not leaving Trenwith, but here, here reaching the top of the hill out of Sawle, dusk wiping out the edges of the land and Demelza walking and humming at my side.”
“I want her, not any other,
not the most beautiful eighteen-year-old damsel born out of a sea-shell, not the most seductive houri of any sultan’s harem; I want her with her familiar gestures and her shining smile and her scarred knees, and I know she wants me in just the same way, and if there’s any happiness more complete than this I don’t know it and am not sure I even want it.”
“Blemishes
on the beauty of a person one loves are like grace notes adding something to a piece of music.”
“The past is over, gone.
What is to come doesn’t exist yet. That’s tomorrow! It’s only now that can ever be, at any moment. And at this moment, now, we are alive–and together. We can’t ask more. There isn’t any more to ask.”
“Not for the first time
he was conscious of emotional lights and shades in his wife that could not be categorised, could not be named as sensuous or emotional as such, perhaps derived from each and gave to each but in essence grew out of a deeper fund of temperament that he still could not altogether apprehend. The simple miner’s daughter was not simple in character at all.”
“Did I behave myself tonight, Ross?’
she asked.
‘Did I behave as Mrs Poldark should behave?’
‘You misbehaved monstrously,’ he said, ‘and were a triumph.”
Fashion, Film & Fine Art Wedding Photographer
Somerset, UK & Europe
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