I love being a Wedding Blogger. Love it. You know why? Well, for lots of reasons if I'm honest, but one of the key ones for me is, I get to share in the wonderfulness that is the love between two people and that warm, glowing fuzzy feeling between them that exists immediately after they have got married.  I can't quite find the right word for it, but anyone who is in love, and who has been married, will know exactly what I mean :)

When I first started out writing this blog almost a year ago, I had to go out and find the content to feature.  Now, that content finds me, and these days I receive many wedding submissions from Photographers and Brides all wanting to feature on these pages, that have become a little place in cyberspace that inspires so many.  And this particular submission, the wedding of Billy and Cathy, who tied the knot on 4th September this year, is one of my favourites...

"I married on 4th September to a wonderful man named Billy. Billy and I are both profoundly deaf but have never let that hold us back. We've been together for nine years so decided to have a big day celebrating and bringing our family together from all over the country to Sheffield and the Peak District.

Our day was extraordinary and beautiful.  Love My Dress provided me with endless inspiration and encouragement in the months before the wedding. We'd love to be featured..."

Love My Dress Wedding Blog - Photography Copyright (c) 2010, Oliver Collinge

This is an except from a blog you can find in full at :

http://www.lovemydress.net/blog/2010/10/town-country-yurt-sign-language-wedding.html#more

A Yurt Wedding...

"We went camping in Cornwall the year before whilst we were on our way to a friend's wedding. On the campsite they had small yurts and I fell in love with the cosiness and beauty of the  wood frame design and searched online when we became engaged and found Cheltenham Yurt Hire . Our friend's wedding was also on a farm and we both enjoyed the relaxed feel of the wedding. We are however very much city slickers coming from London so we decided to have a Town and Country approach combining the best of both worlds. 

Mary and Jim the owners of Smallshaw Farm were so relaxed and helpful.When we visited them we liked them immediately and the setting overlooking the moors with a wind-farm behind was stunning. As we're both deaf, ensuring we could communicate clearly and easily  with our suppliers was very important to us, and probably helped us make decisions about who to go with as people who are good communicators tend to be good at what they do.  Mary and Jim even hand-built an oak bar specially for the Yurt and sorted out all the drinks for us and handled all the suppliers on site. They were so quick to reply to any emails and their beautifully sweet children also helped to chip in pretending to be our guests when we had a ceremony rehearsal in a field at the farm! We are so glad we decided to book the farm and not a hotel. Although it's much more work to do it this way because you need to hire in all the suppliers but you get a much more personal and bespoke arrangement."

"The Yurt at the farm was designed by Cheltenham Yurt Hire and is the only yurt of its kind in the UK as it is a specially elongated design and transparent roof light, and was hand built in May this year.

The Yurt was beautiful in its own right, designed and hand-built by William Templeman of Cheltenham Yurt Hire. He and his partner Suki drove up in an old battered post office van with the yurt folded into a trailer and spent two days constructing it on site. It was fascinating to watch it being put together. The only thing we added was hand-made bunting by my mother Maggie which she created based on the flower scheme Judith at Arena Flowers had designed and of course the incredible flowers themselves."

"Our table plan was a watercolour painting that I painted based on the landscape surrounding the farm. We didn't worry about having a theme or colour scheme we just went for things we loved and had fun making and creating.  I painted the backdrop to the table plan myself, having done a degree in fine art many years before and we hand wrote all the guests names onto squares of watercolour paper and stuck them on top..."

No Cake?...

"We got the family to "donate" cheeses from wherever they lived or to bring some back from their summer holidays and then just piled them high on a cheese board - it went down very well with our guests and our family members appreciated being able to contribute something."

Flowers...

"Billy had two best men, one an old friend and another his cousin William. William made the wedding extraordinary by agreeing to organise all the flowers through his ethical flower business Arena Flowers. He drove them up personally three hours up the M1 to get them there the night before the wedding. 

The flowers at the reception included white, purple and pink-white gladioli; cream, pink and purple stocks; blue agapanthus, liatris, hot pink roses, eucalyptus and hydrangea in beautiful rustic baskets - a complete sensory overload! I've worked at Kew Gardens in the past but I had never seen such incredible arrangements before - I had to go away and have a little cry when I saw them for the first time. I'm so proud of William for setting up and building Arena Flowers into what it is. I couldn't believe how hard Judith had worked and how much care she had taken. I hope she wins awards for her work one day, she truly is very talented and works through the night to make things perfect for her brides."

I love rosemary as I grow tons of it in my garden and Billy and I use it a lot in cooking, I also know it represents remembrance for family members we had lost. The beautiful scent of the herbs, roses and freesias will stay with me forever..."

"We did a lot of things ourselves which were fun and also got a lot of people to chip in. My mother saved jam jars for months for candle holders on the tables and outside to create a candlelit path.

We made the table numbers by getting a big sheet of watercolour paper splashing it all over with paint and cutting the numbers out before sticking them on the jam jars!

Each place setting had a glass with different origami birds which we hand made - Macaws, Swans, Peakcocks and Hummingbirds - each name label had a description about the bird such as "Beautiful Hummingbird wings beat at 12,000 times a minute. They are said to symbolise joy, and their endurance reminds us we can accomplish what may seem impossible in life.

The origami paper cost ¬£4 off Ebay and we learnt how to make the birds by watching You Tube videos. The Moroccan lanterns were bought in a sale from Matalan. The bunting was made from old curtains and cheap fabric. Altogether I think the decorations in the Yurt all in cost under £50 and looked beautiful. We also hired cheap portaloos instead of the expensive wedding toilet trailers but decorated them with second hand artificial flower garlands and flashing fairy lights stuck on with tape!"

"We spent a week on the farm before the wedding, so were completely switched off from work and relaxed. We used the time to go for walks in the countryside together and made all the order of services by hand sitting at a picnic table in the sunshine with a glass of wine. We practiced our speeches in fields to an audience of bemused cows and invented our first dance routine in the empty yurt two nights before the wedding day. It was a wonderful way to prepare and pro-longed the magical feeling you get from getting married..."

Light a Lantern of Love...

I love the lanterns that lit up the scene in the evening - "We bought 10 hour tea lights so they lasted all night...."

Heaven, I'm in Heaven...

"We love the classic film scene when Fred Astaire sings Dancing Cheek to Cheek to Ginger Rogers. We are always playing it on You Tube at home and dancing badly along in the kitchen to cheer us up after a long day at work! Billy created a specially subtitled version for the wedding and then we hired a projector and danced to it whilst it played projected onto the wall of the yurt in the background. Our dancing skills were just as bad as ever though!..."

Words of Wedded Wisdom...

"You don't need to spend a lot of money on decoration and don't worry about having a strict theme, we just did what we liked even if it didn't make much sense - from Mongolian yurts, to Fred and Ginger, to moroccan lanterns, to japanese origami,  to traditional english bunting - we just threw it all together and I think we got away with it! I guess it was a bit like a globetrotting James Bond film changing sets and scenery!

We loved every second of our wedding day and were so grateful to the farm owners, florist, photographer and yurt builders for contributing to making our day so special to our family and guests..."

You see, this is why its so important to get a good Wedding Photographer - these photographs tell such a beautiful story and will be being smiled over and talked about for years and years to come.

These wonderful photographs were taken by Ilkley, Leeds, Harrogate and Yorkshire Wedding Photographer, Oliver Collinge; "Oliver was a recommendation of a photographer that Billy regularly works with when making films. He was fantastic from day one and came out specially to the farm to discuss everything with us. He as a lovely personality and so much enthusiasm for what we wanted - it didn't feel like just another job to him, he genuinely seemed excited by our wedding and the photos were incredible..."