Real Jewish Weddings Archives - Page 5 of 5 - Smashing the Glass

How to unearth inspiration and ideas for your wedding day

11/07/2013 by Karen

Today’s post is written by the lovely Kate Shaw from Perfect Details. I’m a big fan of her site – she supplies the most beautiful wedding dà©cor accessories, hire wear and personalised details that together create some lovely finishing touches for your wedding day.

It’s really, really hot in everybody’s office this week, and any brides-to-be planning their wedding are finding their concentration slipping even more to table centre ideas, and where they can match a ribbon colour to their bridesmaid’s dresses…

But with so many places to research weddings, and too many people happy to give you their experience and opinion, where really is the best place to get new ideas for how you’d like the biggest day of your life to look?

PINTEREST
Currently the best way to lose hours at a time in our office… Careful it’s addictive. Use the menu top left to browse the whole wedding category, or use the search box to go more specific. Whether you’re looking for ideas for your dress, or you want theme ideas there are endless stunning images to inspire you.

Check out Perfect Detail’s Pinterest boards
Check out Smashing The Glass’s Pinterest boards

Find images you like and repin them to one board, or different categories such as invitations, table settings, hanging decorations…

WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER WEBSITES
A picture says a 1000 words? The better photographers have online blogs showing off all their best work, which is going to be capturing the magic and detail of other people’s weddings. You can find a photographer who has worked at your venue before so you can get ideas of how to specifically decorate that venue space.

Steven Brooks, a good friend to PerfectDetails.co.uk, is one of the best there is. His blog is full of gorgeous inspirational shots, giving you ideas not just on how to decorate your venue but also of the photos you’ll want to make sure you ask your photographer to get if you’re not lucky enough to have booked Steven himself!

Check out his blog

Karen & Jeremy | London Jewish Wedding at the Wallace Collection Art Gallery, London, UK

19/06/2013 by Karen

As the founder of Smashing The Glass it’s only right that I share my own wedding day, and all the creative ideas that were behind it, with you.

I love so many of the centuries-old Jewish traditions such as the hora, the beautiful songs, the chuppah, the smashing of the glass etc. but what my now-husband and I very much didn’t want was a party that followed the typical London Jewish-wedding-by-numbers formula… ie. fancy hotel, too many guests, the same kosher caterer that everyone uses, the same band etc…..

VENUE

I had always dreamt of an outdoor summer wedding and that’s one of the reasons why I love Israeli weddings – the chuppah under the stars, the all-night party vibe, the abundance of food and having the ceremony and party all in one venue. But when it came to organising our wedding it meant the world to us to have Jeremy’s 97 year old grandmother there and as she is unable to travel, a wedding abroad with guaranteed summer weather was out of the question.

London, our home city, was our next choice and the criteria for a venue was to have a feel of being in the outdoors without worrying about the unpredictable British weather spoiling the party, and a stylish, intimate venue, preferably with an arty slant to reflect our creative sides.
The Wallace Collection, once a family home, and now a stunning art collection, in the heart of the West End was our perfect choice. The stunning Courtyard flooded with natural light and dotted with trees and sculptures felt utterly al fresco, yet protected us from the elements with a phenomenal glass roof. Breathtaking and intimate at the same time, it ticked all the right boxes.

We wanted to have both the chuppah ceremony and the dinner dancing in the Courtyard to really feel as if the majority of the wedding was outdoors. We also loved the idea of the changing daylight from the hopefully sunny (and it was!) afternoon to the starry night sky. In between the ceremony and dinner our guests were able to look around all the artwork on the first floor of the house where all the galleries were open to our guests to meander round as they chatted, imbibed and grazed on Zafferano‘s (our chosen caterers) delicious canapà©s.

In terms of getting ready and spending our first night as a married couple, we stayed at the gorgeous Home House in Portman Square just a few minutes walk from the Wallace Collection.

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How to personalise your wedding: Create a logo and brand your Big Day

05/06/2013 by Karen

One of the most stylish, cost-effective and easiest ways of personalising your Big Day is to create a logo of you and your fiancà©’s initials or names and use it on your invitations, RSVP cards, thank you cards, menus and any other printed materials.

But why stop there? How about also printing bespoke stickers or having a custom stamp made and personalising even more elements of your day? It’s amazing how simple this is to do and how much fun you can have branding different details of your day.

For my wedding to Jeremy, I used our initials J and K, to create a very clean symbol that represented our union. As is often the case with logos, the simpler the better – the litmus test is said to be can you draw your logo with a stick in the sand? (Try that out on your honeymoon!).

Here you can see our wedding logo’s first outing on our ‘Save The Date’ that I designed.

Next on my design list, was creating the invitations and with these I combined the simplicity of the logo with a pop-art influenced collage of imagery that represented the two of us, our childhoods, and important landmarks and locations in our relationship. We wanted to make our invitations fun and also wanted to share elements of our personalities and relationship with our guests. The printing and production techniques were as important to me as the design so we chose to print them on a beautiful thick 640gsm stock called Omnia that has the texture of watercolour paper. I felt like our guests would almost be receiving a small pop art screen print when they received our invitation!

The text and logo on the reverse of the invitation also had a quality feel as they were printed with raised thermography, and the font itself was traditional and pretty. No swirly wedding text for us! Our printers, Ashwyk, were fabulous to deal with, gave a really attentive service, and produced outstanding results that we were over the moon with.

image: Ashwyk

The finishing touch was custom made square envelopes from Mount Street Printers with our logo on round stickers from Moo on the reverse. For our address labels we used these fantastic clear labels and printed them at home with the same font we used on the invitation. The result was that the addresses looked as though they were professionally printed direct on the envelopes but it was actually all done on a home printer with these amazing clear labels. I really recommend them!