DIY Wedding: The Colour Of Love

Good Day Everyone,

2013 has been a great year for weddings in our social circles. Where we typically go back home to England twice a year, this year we will go three times, due to friends getting married and even then there will be two weddings that we will miss unfortunately :o(

So in honour of these weddings I've decided to do a few wedding posts, drawing upon my personal experience, for inspiration. Now, we all know that weddings can be an expensive business. Just a quick search on Google for the average wedding cost, in the UK in 2013, came back with figures in the region of £18,000-£22,000. Whilst your wedding day will be one of THE most precious days of your life, that, is an awful lot of money to spend on one day (I think). Every bride, myself included, dreams of the perfect wedding day but many of us, again including myself, will inevitably have to make some compromises unless we've recently won the lottery or come from a wealthy background – neither of which was the case for me!

Deciding what to compromise on can require some serious thought and consideration from both the bride and groom. My hubby and I discussed beforehand what we definitely wanted at our wedding, what we could do without and what we could do ourselves... with a little help from our friends :o) And we did a fair bit ourselves! As you know I absolutely LOVE colour and was really excited about doing the fun, colourful bits myself. Things that we did ourselves included bridal bouquet, table flowers, makeup, nails, hair, decorations and favours. We wrote our own place cards and even dressed the wedding chairs the night before with help from a friend (more on these in future blog posts). If I’d  had my own way, I’d have probably made my own wedding cake too (but my hubby put his foot down at that)!

Coming back to this blog post and the ‘colour of love’. There was no doubt in my mind that my bridal bouquet was going to be a bouquet of roses – the ultimate flower of ‘love’ (in my opinion) but what I did deliberate was the colour of the roses. If you ask people which rose colour symbolises love then most will say the ‘red’ rose. However, we all interpret colours and what they mean and how they make us feel in a very personal and subjective manner.

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For me, whilst the classic red rose does hold some romantic notion, on a subjective level, the colour red represents intensity, passion, desire, lust and danger as well as romance but it has a kind of 'obvious' and a bit 'in your face' ness about it, if you get what I mean. Also because I believe passion, desire and love of a real intense nature cannot be sustained over a long period of time, the red rose has a kind of transient and temporary notion that didn't sit too well with me. I wanted something more 'longer term', if that makes any sense?

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I wanted a colour that conveyed longevity, a love of a less intense but more sustainable notion, something that encapsulated the ups and downs, the highs and lows and all the challenges and obstacles my hubby and I had overcome, something that celebrated the fact that we were still together after everything that we had been through, a colour that represented just how fragile, precious and delicate love can be but also how sincere, pure and true it can be. And so my bridal bouquet was a gorgeous shade of 'pink' – a more delicate and 'subtle' colour of love, with a few white roses to represent the sincerity and pureness of love.

Now reading this, you may think, ‘what on Earth is she going on about? Roses are roses and you just pick the colour you like or what goes with your wedding dress’ but like I said the emotions and associations colours conjure up for each of us are very subjective and this is just how I felt and what my mind thought... although I must admit there are times when my mind thinks a little too much, perhaps ;o)

If on the other hand you ‘get’ what I am going on about then great... it means there’s someone out there who thinks a bit like me when it comes to colour :o) In which case, do let me know who you are in the comments below and keep an eye out for more wedding related posts :o)

Love Sheen xxx