She’ll be planning your weddings for you in no time!

Katie, Jamie – & Polly

We’ve got:

• special offer on ethical wedding rings from Chocolate Couture
• bride-to-be review of Your Beautiful Wedding on Any Budget
• call for eco loo experiences
• help Rhinoboy with his ethical engagement ring search

Read the April Ethical Weddings Newsletter

Happy planning!

Katie

Just quote “ethicalweddings” when placing your order to get a generous 20% off your ethical engagement or wedding ring.

Offer ends 30 April 2010.

Find out more about Leblas.

Read an interview with Leblas.

If you’d like to join us at UK AWARE, why not volunteer?

The organisers are looking for some volunteers to help them with the running of the show. Duties will include:

• Helping with registration
• Surveying visitors
• Helping out with the clothes swap
• Looking after the Speaker Areas

The position is unpaid, but they will provide lunch, references if required, endless gratitude and of course you’ll get the chance to explore the show in all its glory.

If you can help out on Thursday 15 (set up), Friday 16 and Saturday 17 April they will love you forever! Or if you can only manage one day that would still be a huge help.

If you like the sound of that let Jodie or Phil know: jodie@ukaware.com or philippa@ukaware.com

Don’t forget if you want tickets to the show there are special reduced rates for Ethical Weddings readers. Snap up your discounted UK AWARE tickets now.

We’ve got:

• another great offer from Leblas on ethical engagement and wedding rings
• bride-to-be reviews of The Rough Guide to Weddings
• a raw green wedding story
• Ethical Weddings on eco wedding panel at UK AWARE 17 April

Read the March Ethical Weddings Newsletter.

Happy planning!

Katie

Peter smelts aluminium as a hobby but it was Andrea who came up with the idea of collecting and recycling 400,000 cans – the number they would need to pay for their $3,500-$4,000 medieval-style wedding.

They say:

…even simple weddings cost more than a few dollars. We don’t really have much extra cash sitting around, since we’re just starting out. Add that to the fact that environmental responsibility plays a big part in our lives, and we hatched the crazy plan. Pay for the wedding – with recycling. Aluminum recycling is one of the most sustainable and useful forms of recycling. We’re shooting for 400,000 aluminum cans – approximately 5 tons of empty cans.
 

Based in Spokane in the state of Washington, the couple have harnessed the power of the world wide web via Facebook, Twitter and their own weddingcans.com website to set in motion a surge in can-recycling as green romantics show their support for this very sustainable celebration.

In just a few weeks they’ve collected over 90,000 cans (25,781 actual cans and 66,571 in the cash equivalent to the recycled cans, via the PayPal account set up on their site) but still have a fair way to go to reach their 400,000 target by 31 July when they plan to wed.

If you feel inspired to help them on their way in this romantic recycling quest, take a look at weddingcans.com where you can find out more about their project, how many cans they’ve collected so far and – most importantly – where to send your cans.

Good luck guys!

Katie

She is very cute and very clever, but it may take a bit of work to get her fully up to speed in the world of ethical and green weddings, so we hope you’ll bear with us if our posts are a little sporadic as we train her up over the next few weeks!

Katie, Jamie & Polly x

download Donnie Darko

Seasonal wedding flowers

The church was beautiful, we found a florist who was a friend of my parents, and who was sympathetic to our green ideas.

She sourced flowers and greenery as seasonally as possible, including some raided from my parents’ garden the previous day (!), and also made up some planters of growing flowers and herbs that we took away to keep afterwards.  The results were stunning.

A very personal wedding ceremony

Our church wedding was fantastic too.  As we are both Christians, the spiritual aspect of marriage was really important to us, so getting married in church was particularly special.

The service was wonderful – our friend and university chaplain led the service so he was able to tailor it to us quite a lot (his address to the congregation after the marriage involved Bagpuss!) – and as there is quite a lot of choice about what wording to use for the marriage service, and which readings (Bible or not) and music to use, the whole thing felt very personal.

We entered the church to the Beatles’ ‘Here comes the sun’ in the end, very happy! We involved friends and family in leading the readings, prayers and music too, which was lovely.  We exchanged wedding rings from Cred (who really impressed us), and our little ‘engagement ring’ trees made it along to the church too as decorations.  And we made our own service sheets (using Evolve recycled printer paper), including our story in them.

Snap happy guests

After the ceremony we did a big photo session in the pretty churchyard, with my keen amateur photographer uncle doing the ‘posed’ photos, and the rest of our photos taken by the guests who then posted their digital photos on to us.

It worked out really well, despite what you hear about how you must get in a professional.  With so many people doing your photos you are bound to have a fantastic selection of shots, and they covered different groups of guests, as well as getting some fantastic informal pics to add to the posed ones.

Homemade confetti

We had made our own confetti the previous summer, by drying rose petals in the oven and storing them in warm, dark and dry boxes. We decorated the boxes we stored it in with some shiny red paper from Oxfam (again – they did well out of us!) to make pretty serving boxes to pass round for guests to pick out handfuls from.  And it was so beautiful, the colours were preserved really well.

The cherry tree in the churchyard decided to add to our confetti and showered us with blossom as soon as we stepped out of the church, which was VERY cute.  It made a wonderful backdrop to the photos too.

Love,

Helen and Mike

It was an amazing and beautiful day. The wedding party began to arrive the day before, and we put the finishing touches to the decorations and food that could be done in advance. In the evening, we had a small family/wedding party celebration, and then Mike and our best man went to stay the night with friends.

The wedding day began with grey skies and a forecast of rain… but as we started preparing, the clouds began to clear, and the day turned hot and sunny!

Mike, his family and the ushers set about decorating the village hall for the reception with pot plants, a photo montage of silly pictures of us as kids, our lovely red and blue fairtrade balloons and the bunting we borrowed.

Here come the girls

Meanwhile, my bridesmaids and I spent the morning making sure the right decorations went to the right venue, and getting pretty!

They had all bought/ brought their own dresses after I’d given them a colour sample, to make sure they all got a dress they liked and that suited them, so it was quite exciting to see all the dresses together.

They looked fantastic together, each in a slightly different shade of cherry red, it was lovely. To coordinate their outfits we had bought them each a ‘vegetable ivory’ pendant from DeMEC, who sell beautiful fairtrade jewellery, and I made them some little hair fascinators to wear.

I’d had to buy some new makeup from BBoheme since I don’t have very much, but other than that we just used what we already had, plus a bit of swapping and sharing.

And soon it was time to head over to the village hall, once the men were safely out of the way over at the church (we didn’t want to spoil the surprise of seeing one another in wedding clothes before the ceremony).

Green groom in vintage brown

Mike found his suit on Ebay, an awesome brown vintage 1970s suit, complete with flares, which suits him perfectly. Coupled with a really smart shirt and cherry red tie, both found in charity shops, he looked amazing. The ushers had brought their own suits, but we gave them coordinating ties and buttonholes.

Oxfam Bridal to the rescue

I found my dress in Oxfam Bridal in Leicester, the first bridal shop I went in (though I went in another afterwards, just to make sure!). It was beautiful, a vintage style dress with a simple lacy overlay on it, for which I borrowed an underskirt from a recently married friend.

I know I’ve gone on and on about Oxfam Bridal, but I was so impressed I’m going to recommend it again! And I managed to find some shoes in the exact same style as the dress somehow on Oxfam’s online shop. Pretty fortunate!

I wore the dress with an antique lace veil that has been in Mike’s family for generations, which was really special. I also managed to find this pretty necklace in a charity shop too. So we had fun putting the outfits together!

I’ll post again soon on the rest of the day,

Love, Helen

Cristina Reitz-Krueger got in touch with us as she thought our lovely Ethical Weddings readers might be just the people to help her out.

If you are between 20 and 35, live in the US and are planning to get married or have a commitment ceremony in the next 365 days, Cristina would be really grateful if you could assist her in her research by completing a 25-30 minute online survey.

In Cristina’s words, you would be able to:

• help a doctoral candidate
• increase the pool of scientific knowledge
• support research on marriage and families
• spend some time thinking about your relationship!

Cristina is working with Dr. Charlotte J. Patterson, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. The study has been approved by the University of Virginia Institutional Review Board #2009025800.

If you and/or your romantic partner would like to get involved or want more info, please email Cristina at survey.couples@gmail.com. She will then send you a link that you can use to access the study.

Katie