Planning a wedding is some of the most fun you can have before saying ‘I do’ on your big day. You get to find a beautiful venue, you get to taste professionally catered food over and over again, and you get to plan a fun (and even drunken) reception once the main ceremony is over.  Of course, wedding planning can be pretty stressful, especially if people keep cancelling their RSVPs and the venue falls through. But in the end, it’s a process that makes a day in your life totally romantic and completely magical! It’s also a process that allows your real personality to shine. You and your partner should have a day that’s all about you and who you really are as people. However, when you’re a creative person who loves to get the imagination flowing, wedding planning can seem like the most daunting task in the world.  After all, it’s difficult to plan around all of your ideas and the limited budget you need to stick to! It’s why a lot of people use pre-arranged checklists and keep all of their receipts; you need to track what still needs doing and how much you’ve got left.  But we believe wedding planning should be a creative process. When you’ve got a naturally creative spark about you, your wedding will always be one to remember. And with all that in mind, here’s how to make sure your personality comes through on your big day. 

A lot of people make vision boards when they’re about to get married. It helps them to tie the picture of the wedding together, and makes their inner vision a lot easier to explain to friends, family, venue owners, and wedding planners. The majority of vision boards are made online these days. And we understand why! Apps like Pinterest are very useful and super easy to use; you can also take the resulting board anywhere you go. However, they don’t quite hit the spot for a lot of people. When you’ve only got a phone screen to check when you’re shopping for wedding dresses and matching jewellery, or party bags and their favours, things can get a bit awkward and frustrating. But as a creative person, you’re not going to have any trouble putting a more traditional, manual vision board together! You get to really flex your creative muscle through doing this as well. 

If you want to have a creative wedding, mix and match your decor as much as possible. We recommend hand making as many pieces as possible (more on that down below), as well as throwing together all the different styles you like to make one big commemorative melting pot.  Take the dinner hall you’re going to be eating in. You could have art decor columns in the back, mid century tables and chairs in the front, and 90s rave drapes at the front to welcome the guests in. You could even call this kind of decor ‘the flow of time’, if you like the idea of creating art through your celebration of love. You can even take the process of creating a wedding theme and reverse it. For example, some people find wedding theme inspiration in the smallest of things, such as a set of novelty wedding cake toppers or glass terrarium table centrepieces. They then build the rest of the decor around these items, rather than the other way around. No matter what, wedding decor is where you can be creative the most. The wedding decor industry is huge - you’re not going to run out of ideas or have them shot down, no matter how wild they might be! Whatever you choose to decorate the venue with is going to set the tone for the day and for your memories. Make sure it’s a theme you’d love to get married in and look back on. If anyone tells you you can and can’t do things a certain way, make sure you uninvite them! 

It’s quite common for churches, old stately homes and castles, and golf courses with attached hotels to be popular wedding venues. However, they are not the only choices you have for a venue for your big day. You can go totally off book here and find somewhere else that fits your personality better. This could mean you get married at the circus, or in a jazz club or nightclub, or even with a big bouncy castle in the background! It’s up to you; all you need to do is be willing to explore your options and find the place you and your partner love the most. Some people even get married on farms or in a barn with the animals all around them - how about that for your wedding day? You could even just get married at home, or at a friend or family member’s house. If you and your partner are both ‘homebodies’ and love to spend time with your loved ones, this is a wonderful way to recognise and share that. You get to get married in a space you know and love, and your living room is never going to look better! 

The invitations say a lot about your wedding day. Indeed, they may be the first thing a guest hears about your plans, and that makes them very much the representative of the happiest day of your life. As such, they should also be the best representatives of your personality. Get yourself some paper, a pencil, and even some watercolours and just experiment with a few different designs. Use patterned backgrounds, draw in little critters and mushrooms if you love nature, and make sure you’re truly happy with what you finish with. If you’d like to, you can make each invitation by hand, or you can choose to scan the final design into a computer and go from there. You can then use a quality printer website to make your own invitations, if the first option sounds a bit too much like a carpal tunnel issue in the making! 

A handmade approach isn’t tacky, nor untidy, and it definitely does not lack creative personality! As such, you should use it as liberally as possible during the wedding planning process. Anything that can be handmade, such as the wedding bouquets, table centrepieces, namecards, the welcoming board etc., should be handmade! This will also save you a lot of money on hiring people to do all of these for you, even if it means getting in from work and immediately turning to threading flowers together on a regular basis. If the work gets a bit too much for you, ask your loved ones to help out. Even if you want to do everything on your own, rope them in and have some fun with it. It’s unlikely you’re the only creative member of your family or social circle! But if that isn’t going to wash either, you can outsource one or two tasks to a designer and save yourself some stress. And don’t worry - if you want the cake made by a professional who really knows how to work with flavour, go ahead and order the one you’ve got your heart set on. If they know what they're doing, they’re not going to have any trouble translating the cake in your head into the mixing bowl and onto the cake board!