I’ve decided that when planning a wedding it is much easier once you decide on a theme, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a colour, an era or whatever, it gives a focus to decisions about stationary, flowers etc. I remember years ago (like over 25!) one of my friends had a themed wedding, at the time it was unusual, I think my mother found the whole idea somewhat amusing, but actually I think her mother was ahead of her time!!

Our theme was roses, particularly the roses we grew in our garden. Our tables were named after them, they adorned our stationary, we even gave Champagne Moments (a lovely rose) potted as a lasting gift instead of a bouquet of flowers. At the time there was a shop in Leeds called Confetti and Lace, they sold pressed miniature red roses, I used these for all the stationary.

Invitations are traditionally posted around six weeks before the day, which for us meant late January / early February, either way they needed to be made before Christmas! As we were only having 30 guests I didn’t have too many to make, however I made spares for menus and thank you cards.

I worked out a very simple design of a rectangle of gold ribbon with a rose glued on top. A ribbon round the fold completed the card. We printed out our own centre pages on the computer, both for the invitation and for the menu.

Place name cards were made with a rose on the side. I learnt calligraphy as a teenager so I wrote all the names out and also made a table plan. I’d often read in magazines that an average of 25% of guests can give back word for a wedding but I never quite believed it, however I have to say that 7 of our guests had to back out during the last week!!! At first I rewrote the table plan by hand, but I must admit that the last four ‘substitutes’ I just said ‘ok, you’re Janet and John, you’re Fred and Florence!

I used the same ribbon and roses to decorate a candle, two of our sons lit the candle to represent the joining of two families.

I also made favours which included a hand written gift tag with our initials and the date on, together with a rose of course! A book of handmade paper was used as a guest book, I wrote the first page, it turned out a bit fuzzy as handmade paper absorbs ink really quickly!