Our wedding cupcakes

While I'm on the topic of cupcake toppers, here are the cake toppers from our wedding cake! I printed these by hand using hand carved rubber stamps bought from Craft Pudding on Etsy. We also printed our Thank You cards with the same faces!

We chose chocolate cupcakes over a white iced traditional cake, because we both love chocolate and I often make brownies for my hubby! We have Karen's Cakes in Paignton to thank for making our delicious wedding cupcakes. Karen came to our rescue and managed to squeeze making these in at short notice and everyone loved them!

Mum and I made the cake stand using silver cake rounds/boards with my wedding ribbon pinned on. The levels are made using polystyrene cake rounds which can be bought from cake suppliers - I bought mine from Crafty Cakes in Exeter. We made this for around £30 which is less than it costs to hire a plastic cupcake tower stand!

Wedding photos credit Lumen Photography

Choosing our church

It was by chance that we found the lovely church that we chose to get married in, when Mr B spotted it's spire through trees, as we drove back from Budleigh Salterton one day. We had churches on the brain, having spent a few weeks doing a tour of East Devon churches, using our now cherished book, The Pilgrims Guide to Devon's Churches.

Clyst St George is a very small village (a church and school, no shops!) set close to the A376 and surrounded by fields. We went to have a closer look and the quaint church appealed to us immediately. Once inside, we knew it was the one for us!

Clear glass windows create a light and airy atmosphere, with only a few featured stain glass windows in Pre-Raphaelite style. The simple and light wooden decor suited Mr B's more modern tastes, while I was in awe of the medieval tower and traditional relics. As we learnt more about it were both facinated by the history of the church and how the community came together to rebuild it after being bombed in WW2.

After attending a service there we enquired about getting married at the church and were put in touch with the Church Warden to make arrangements. As they were in the process of getting a new vicar at the time we had to wait patiently for a few months to meet them and to confirm our date, but it was worth the wait.

There aren't a lot of references to the church online, so I'll be sharing some details and photos in case you're interested!

For those looking for a church online try Find a Church - The UK Church Directory.

Setting the date

We knew we wanted to have a summer wedding, but our date was mostly determined by the availability of our chosen venue and the varying prices of the seasons. June, July, August tend to be more pricy, which is why Spring and Autumn weddings are increasingly popular. This September I went to a beautifully sunny wedding that it could have been mid summer!

We found trying to secure both the venue and the church for the same date was a juggling act, but it's all worked out fine. I can see the advantage of having the ceremony and reception at the same place if you have the option!

It can be hard choosing somewhere so far in advance (for us it was 17 months), but once you've put a deposit down you have your wedding date! Then it's time to start planning and booking everything else!

Some useful wedding venue sites:

On the weddings site for South West Tourism you can search by type of wedding, amount of guests and as well as by area.

A National site with many search results weddingvenues.com has very detailed descriptions, lots of photos, and a contact form to request a brochure for each venue.

An extensive list of wedding venues with useful descriptions can be found at westcountryweddingguide.co.uk.

Girls night in

I’ve been out of blogging action for a couple of weeks due to a week away in Dorset followed by a week with a lingering cold. However, I have been gathering a lot of South West wedding ideas along the way and will be posting frequently from now on.

I have something up my sleeve for budget brides who live in Dorset or nearby, and a lot to report on my own wedding dress hunt...with only 11 months to go finding a dress soon is apparently of great importance!

Tonight my fiancé is at a mate’s stag do somewhere in Somerset, so seeing as I have the couch to myself I'm going to endulge and watch Bride Wars...which I’ve wanted to see for ages.