ALL OUR IDEAS FOR ORGANISING A COUNTRY WEDDING!
We can organise a country wedding for you. A timeless, ecological and poetic trend, the country theme is easy to adopt and simple to apply to every aspect of your wedding: from the announcement to the venue, from the table decorations to your wedding outfits.
The codes of country style
When it comes to materials, choose natural ones of course: flowers and plants, wood, linen, hessian, straw...
The dominant colours are green and white, which can be combined with beige, terracotta, yellow ochre and parma.... According to your taste.
When it comes to choosing a venue, depending on the season and the number of guests, opt for a botanical garden, a barn, a farm or even a forest...
For the arrival of the bride and groom, have some fun with a tractor if you're not afraid of getting dirty! You can choose a more romantic option, arriving by horse-drawn carriage or, if you're a good horseman, on horseback.
Country wedding invitations and other stationery
Here's a low-cost, floral idea for original, country-style invitations.
Create pretty settings with cut flowers, take photos of these settings and use them as the basis for your invitations, menus, place cards, thank-you cards, welcome signs, table plans, guest book covers, etc.
Your country wedding decoration
Here are a few easy-to-make ideas that will immediately give your decor a country feel.
The flowers
Compose bouquets of wildflowers, with wild grasses and stems of varying lengths, rather than highly worked and stylised florists' flowers that will quickly give off an overly contemporary note. In other words, opt for gypsophila, waxflowers, hydrangeas, eucalyptus... rather than lilies, red roses or gerberas.
Go for recycled vases. For table bouquets, use small recycled glass bottles or why not vintage teapots? For larger bouquets to be placed anywhere, on the floor, on the furniture... arrange them in large wicker baskets or zinc watering cans, or even in pairs of boots, having slipped a glass jar into each one beforehand.
Table decoration
When it comes to decorating your tables, focus on plants:
- small bouquets (low enough so that guests facing each other can talk without having to cross a plant barrier),
- wooden logs,
- ivy branches,
- foam,
- Candles poured into small earthenware or glass jars, or even found tea cups...
Choose tablecloths and runners in white, beige or sage linen. Tie a small bouquet of flowers to the back of each chair with a piece of linen, jute or wedding veil ribbon.
Room decoration
Bring nature into the room by surrounding pillars, banisters and posts with ivy. If you can hang items from the ceiling, create large plant crowns. To do this:
- Use plastic hula hoops, surround them with ivy and then slip branches, weeds and flowers into the gaps.
- To prevent the flowers from wilting, there are small plastic pipettes with a watertight cover. Fill them with water and slide in each flower stem before inserting them into the wreath.
- To attach your wreath to the ceiling in a balanced way, tie 4 strands of string of the same length equidistantly on the circle and join these 4 strands with a knot at the top. This knot is attached to a beam or other structure in the ceiling of the building.
- Depending on the size of the room, multiply the wreaths in different sizes and at different heights.
To display your table plan :
- Get an easel and a large wooden frame.
- Print your seating plan or the list of each table using the same codes as the photos of the flowers on your invitation.
- Attach these prints to the frame.
- Place the frame on the easel and add a small garland of flowers and ivy running around the frame and easel.
- You can add a garland of lights amidst the plants for extra magic in the evening.
A ceremonial arch
Build the base of your arch from a converted pergola. Garden centres sell bamboo structures for climbing plants, perfect for creating a country arch.
Once the arch is fixed to the ground, decorate it with foliage and ivy over almost the entire structure, concentrating on the top of the arch. Add large flowers. To add flowers, you have 2 options:
- Compose a bouquet with a florist's gel or foam base to retain water. Fix this bouquet in a corner, then widen it by adding single flowers in the arch around the bouquet, on either side of the corner.
- Create two bouquets of the same size and attach them to the top of the arch in a "butterfly" style, i.e. one bouquet facing left and the other right, with their stems crossing in the middle. Hide these stems by adding a few large flowers in the centre.
Once the plants are in place, you are free to add a few bows using wedding veils, linen ribbons, etc..... Textiles to match your outfits and/or tablecloths.
Photobooth
Two in one: you can also use your ceremony arch as a Photobooth!
Here's a tip for easily recovering all the photos taken by your guests on that memorable day:
- create a shared folder on an online drive
- Copy the link (open to all) from this folder into an application that generates a QR code. There are quite a few free applications for creating QR codes.
- Print this QRcode on a board near the Photo Booth, or on the menus, invitations, etc., explaining to your guests that they can place all their photos in this folder.
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Your outfits, accessories and gifts for country guests!
Once again, the country theme gives you plenty of freedom to match your outfits to your decor.
For the bride and groom's outfit
Use fresh or dried flowers to dress up your accessories: hair combs, earrings, buttonholes...
Check out this tutorial on how to make dried flower accessories.
For the bridal bouquet, create a multicoloured country bouquet in the same spirit as your table bouquets. You can also make a bouquet of wheat ears or a large tassel of gypsophila, for example.
For the procession outfits
For guests
At the entrance to the room, place a large bouquet of gypsophila or small wildflowers with a sign encouraging each guest to put a flower in their buttonhole or in their hair. This simple idea will create a country-style dress code for all your guests.
With a bigger budget, you can also hand out straw hats or fans.
As a traditional little gift for guests to place on the tables or hand out during the cocktail party, here are a few rural ideas:
- small pots of locally produced honey
- Seed packets for planting
- Handmade candles
- Handmade paper postcard with seeds included for sowing
- Magnet with a photo of a flower taken from your invitations
Here are a few tips to help you stay on top of things!
Doing a large part of your wedding decoration yourself has real economic and ecological advantages, and allows you to have a decoration that suits you, but on the other hand it requires energy, time and organisation. Here are a few tips to help you stick to your schedule and enjoy your big day stress-free!
1. Draw up a timetable with a checklist of everything that needs to be done (administrative, service providers, DIY, etc.). There are some very good websites that will guide you through these timetables.
2. Set aside some 'wedding preparation' time in each other's diaries, especially if you tend to procrastinate.
3. Share the work! If you ask them well in advance, your family, witnesses and friends will be delighted to help you before and on the big day. Don't hesitate to entrust multiple tasks to many people rather than overloading one or two people you trust. It will be much easier for those helping you to know that they have a task at a given time during the wedding and that they can then enjoy the moment, rather than having to stay on their toes throughout the big day.
4. For all the decorations you want to do yourself, ask yourself each time how big a job it is, what is reasonable to do yourself and what deserves to be done by a professional. When you're trying to save money, you sometimes end up spending sleepless nights working on folding or collages, for example...