WeddingDates.ie

You’d be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t care about the environment these days, but few of us consider the environmental impact of our weddings. And let’s be honest – if we do, a lot of us think “It’s one day, stuff it” and move on. But it’s increasingly common for couples to want their wedding day to reflect their values, including their environmental ethics, and that’s where things can get tricky.

Wedding dresses fly all over the world to make their way up the aisle, and even the materials that go into them can be a concern for some brides – unethically traded fabrics, chemical dyes, and even silk itself can give the eco-concious bride pause.

A whole crop of enterprising wedding vendors have sprung up to meet the needs of this emerging bridal market. One of these is designer Deborah Lindquist, who has crafted a collection of stunning, unusual and environmentally friendly couture wedding gowns.

Her designs are created using a combination of “recycled cashmere, repurposed kimonos and saris, vintage silk scarves, and sustainable materials such as hemp, organic cotton and organic wool.”

As with the vintage lace in this dress, Deborah re-purposes a lot of existing materials for her designs. Obviously, this has a tiny production footprint and has become very, very trendy; you can use your mother’s wedding dress, a thrifted gown or virtually any other fabric in a process know as “upcycling” – a nod to upcycling’s environmentally friendly cousin, recycling.

So you’re planning your wedding day, dreaming up themes of romance and eternal love, and suddenly you have a brilliant notion: to dress your bridesmaids in one of the most romantic dresses from one of the most gaggingly romantic films ever.  In short, you decide to dress your bridesmaids in Rose’s famous evening gown from the movie Titanic.

You know, Titanic. The movie where the two main characters fall in love, hit an iceberg, sink an entire cruise ship, and oh yeah – the guy dies.

OK, sure. Anyway, moving right along, since this dress does not exist outside the 20th Century Fox studios, you decide to ask your future mother in law to sew the dresses for you. She declines help, she declines a pattern, and on the day of your wedding, she reveals the dresses she has spent six months making (or not):

I’m not particularly superstitious, but I’m pretty sure the bride jinxed this one right from the start, what with the “1,500 dead people and a broken heart” theme. If you didn’t catch this true story when it made the rounds 10 years ago, you can still read the whole story of this epic wedding diaster at Etiquette Hell.

To rent or to buy? Luckily, should you decide to buy a tuxedo, you don’t have to worry about rising interest rates and mortgage forclosure. I always assumed, though, that buying a tux cost about the same amount as buying a small one bed flat in D2, but just today a girlfriend pointed me to DickieBows.ie.

At DickieBow.ie, you can choose from one, two and three button tuxedos complete with tux trousers, tux shirt, a choice of colours for the bow tie, and free cuff links in stylish packages that range from €150 to €289 delivered. The upper end of their range includes Ben Sherman and Daniel Hechter tuxes – very swanky.

This costs only marginally more than a standard tux rental, and if you’re going to be needing to kit out in full DJ regalia for other weddings, corporate bashes or other events in the foreseeable future, buying can make a lot of sense over renting.

Delivery seems pretty fast, too, with an overnight delivery option or the standard two day delivery included in the price. Not that anyone would leave this to the last minute. Ahem.

This whole “Yippee! We’re married! Now throw things at us!” tradition of confetti and rice chucking has never made a huge amount of sense to me, but a lot of wedding traditions are a little strange when you stop to think about them. The throwing of confetti is actually meant to bestow prosperity and fertility on the newly wed couple – a connection that’s less than obvious in modern times.

Assuming cash and babies sound good to you, rice is apparently out these days (it’s bad for the birds who eat it), and traditional confetti is frowned upon (it’s environmentally unfriendly) so it’s time to come up with some creative options you’d actually want to be showered with.

Top choices: rose petals are romantic and beautiful; birdseed is inexpensive to buy in bulk and feeds our feathered friends; and lavender is an unusual and fragrant way to make your way up the aisle.

You can make or buy simple cones in a variety of papers and tie them to the aisle seats to provide your posh replacement confetti to your guests:

Alternatively, you can buy fluted bonbonniere boxes and fill them with the sprinkles of your choice:

These tied rounds are easy to make yourself with some inexpensive muslin, a pair of pinking shears and lengths of ribbon in the colour of your choice:

Finally, if you just want to buy something off the shelf, bubbles are a fun and beautiful way to sprinkle the bride and groom, and if your photographer is any good, look amazing in photos. A whole range of bridal bubbles are available online in Ireland from Lantz, but you can also use any kind of bubbles and even wrap them with your own custom labels.

Most of us do not end up walking down the aisle with our very first loves, and in retrospect I’m glad of that fact. Not only did I score a rather fabulous husband, but I avoided having my first boyfriend’s mother chained around my neck for the rest of my life.

This woman hated me. She hated me so much she refused to address me in the first person. Her contempt dripped off her like her tacky, tacky perfume – and the antipathy was entirely mutual.

The problem was less me and more the fact that no teenaged hussy was good enough for her boy, but I sincerely did a double-take when I saw these yesterday:

I’m pretty sure these invitations are not real, but I just have this creepy feeling that had my life worked out slightly differently, they could have been.

I’ve always been a fan of Halloween weddings around this time of year because let’s face it: autumnal themes are hard to work with. But Halloween weddings give you a really fun, ready-made theme and when you decide to really go for it, you can end up with a cake nobody will ever forget, like this one from Let Them Eat Cake:

If you don’t want to go down the whole Halloween colour way route, there are still spooktacular cakes to be had, like this really beautiful blue and silver toned cake from Wild Cakes:

And of course, you can always serve these absolutely adorable ghost cupcakes instead of traditional wedding cake, or send one home with each guest as a wedding favour:

I’m an absolute sucker for wedding cupcakes, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one cuter.

All of these Halloween finds were shamelessly borrowed from Cake Wrecks, a must-read website if only because it will frequently show you what the absolute worst case, everything-gone-wrong, nightmare wedding cake scenario can look like.

Hopefully at someone else’s wedding.

One of the nice things about getting married is that people tend to give you really thoughtful cards filled with good wishes, and occassionally, with money. Woo hoo! I mean, nothing beats that really lovely cut crystal loo roll holder from Auntie Maude, but cheques and cash are nice, too.

It’s also nice to give your guests a designated place to stick these cards. Traditionally, this has been with the bride or groom, the maid of honour or – bizarrely – in a bird cage of all things, but providing a box to put them in at the guest book table is a nice option. And providing an absolutely awesome box to put them in is an even better option.

Here’s a basic example of how to DIY your own wedding cake card box from three different sized hat boxes – you just stack them, glue them, and cut holes between the layers so the cards can fall down:

Once you can see the basic construction, it’s easy to understand how you can paint them, cover them in fabric, use wrapping or origami paper, or even paper mache them and add your own embellishments. But there is no need to stick with basic, boring, traditional white unless you have your heart set on a white wedding:

DIYing your own wedding cake card box gives you a million options – match your theme colours, you brides maid dresses, pick up elements of your reception decor, or even match your actual cake! The above examples come from this Ebay retailer, but making your own is a great, inexpensive project and a fun wedding shower activity, too.