Hello, today’s blog is from me, Hana, here on work experience at Wedding Ideas. Getting the chance to go to Wedding Ideas Magazine was a dream come true for me, and what better way to get stuck in than writing up one of your amazing real-life weddings? Can you imagine having to plan an entire wedding in secret? Tracy and Matt did just that.
“We met at a cinema in Crewe,” remembers Tracy. “Matt worked as a projectionist while he was completing a music degree at university and I was an usher whilst at college. We worked together for two years as friends then got together in April 2000, 12 years ago.”
“There wasn’t really a proposal as such,” she explains. “It just kind of came about in a conversation whilst having breakfast on holiday in Lanzarote on Christmas morning 2010. We’ve always been too busy with other things to think about getting married and so hadn’t really thought about it much, but it just suddenly felt right.”
“Our wedding was a complete surprise from all our guests, except our parents who we told four days earlier,” confides Tracy. “I was turning 30 the day after and so had invited all the guests along to what they thought was my 30th birthday – 80’s themed fancy dress. We asked them to come early as we told them we had a famous 80’s star performing at 4pm and that’s the only time we could get them for. Everyone arrived at 3pm for a drinks’ reception and after 30 minutes Matt and I slipped away.”
Matt went to the ceremony room, decorated with pink up-lighters, pink star cloth and white chairs and aisle runner, while Tracy went back to their room to get changed into her wedding dress. “It was a vintage Jenny Packham dress from the 80s, which I found online,” explains Tracy.
“The guests were led into the ceremony room at 3.45 pm expecting to see the famous act, and when they saw it was set up for a ceremony with Matt and the registrar standing at the front, they were literally gobsmacked! Members of the band performed classic 80’s songs acoustically while the guests waited for me and my Dad, dressed as Bully from Bullseye, to arrive,” she adds.
The couple had a fun and informal ceremony, with Tracy walking down the aisle to ‘Grow Old With You‘ from The Wedding Singer and Matt dressed as Ted Theodore Logan from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. “Two members of the band, who are also our friends, composed a reading made up of classic 80’s songs including the Ice Ice Baby rap,” laughs Tracy.
After the ceremony, the guests were led outside to see Tim Marsten from Juggling Inferno perform an amazing fire show before going up to the bar for mulled wine, eggnog and Pimm’s. “We did the speeches in the bar – again very informal. I did the main speech as Matt isn’t really a speech person, and both our dads also said a few words. After the speeches we carried on with the drinks reception where we had a giant Scaletrix, photobooth, magician, caricaturist, table football and air hockey.”
The main party room was decorated with different coloured up-lighters and giant silhouettes of famous 80’s stars. Their cake was a tower of cupcakes topped with a Rubix cube cake made by a friend.
The couple chose an indoor vegetarian BBQ for their wedding breakfast followed by cheese and biscuits, which was supplied by the hotel, Wynchwood Park in Crewe. “After the food we had an 80’s quiz with a Rubix cube challenge and 80’s dance off. Our first dance was ‘The Power of Love‘ by Frankie Goes To Hollywood, we just decided on the song on the day,” says Tracy.
The entertainment-heavy evening continued with live music. “We had an amazing performance from The Daggers with lead singer Sam Black. Later in the night, Indie Killers brought us back to the future with an awesome set followed by DJ Adrian Hughes and more 80’s tunes,” remembers Tracy.
The couple pulled the whole thing off for under their £10,000 budget, and spent a week’s honeymoon in a log cabin with a hot tub near York.
All entertainment provided by Warble Entertainment.
