Since I’m getting married later this year, I’ve decided that it would be fun to share my wedding journey with all of you! Kortney & Katie have already published some amazing posts about their own weddings here on the blog (that’s how I found Vegan Housewives in the first place!) and I’ll be giving you a monthly insight into how we’ve been planning our all-vegan wedding over the next few months!
When I first started planning, I found myself really struggling to find information on how to plan a vegan wedding. My fiancé and I are both vegan and were set on having a cruelty-free celebration, but we couldn’t find much information on how to put it together, especially not in the Liverpool area! I hope that this series might help some of you going through the same process!
When we first got engaged, I started researching wedding venues right away. We kept the engagement a secret for a little bit, so when we did tell people that we chose to spend our future together, planning was already going full steam ahead! We ended up sending out engagement announcement cards because our families are scattered all over the place and it was just too difficult to tell everyone individually, but I think announcing it in person would have been a lovely alternative, had that been at all feasible.
Once the word was out, we started looking around more earnestly. We set our budget and started putting together our guest list (Martha Stewart Weddings has a great toolkit for all of this) and began the ongoing process of what was important to us and what was unnecessary. This is something that’s still ongoing and probably won’t be finished until the big day. When you first decide to have a wedding, you have all these amazing ideas in your head (or on Pinterest, let’s be honest), but incorporating all of them is not always possible unless you’re on an unlimited budget. That’s okay though, because you’ve probably already picked your favourite elements, albeit unconsciously. In our case, we considered each of our ideas, played around with several different themes and ended up choosing something that is actually fairly undefined… but that’s for another post!
When you have your budget and a rough idea of what you want and how many people will be there, it’s a good time to get the ‘big’ things out of the way. For us this was the venue, the catering, the stationary, the photographer and the cake. The stationary was the easiest, as we’re customising and printing our own over on Wedding Chicks. The photographer was a bit more difficult, but my fiancé, Jake, spent ages googling wedding photographers and found a package that was exactly what we were looking for at a reasonable price. After meeting the photographer we knew it was the right choice! Choosing the venue took us a bit longer. After sending out endless amounts of emails and getting lots of unbelievably high quotes (£3500 for a marquee? No thanks) we stumbled across the perfect place! Fortunately, this included the catering, but this is again a topic I will go into in more detail in a later post. In our case, the most difficult thing to source was the cake. I can’t tell you how many replies I received saying “sorry, we can’t do vegan cake”, which I found nerve-wrecking. I was worried we’d have to settle for a second-rate cake and was even considering making the whole thing myself when I stumbled across a lovely baker at a local wedding fair. She was more than happy to make a vegan cake and her designs are absolutely beautiful. It all worked out to the best in the end!
Now that all these things were crossed off my to-do list, we began focusing on more detailed aspects of organization. Next month, I’ll be talking about our wedding theme!
Have you ever planned a vegan wedding? What did you do first?
About Hannah
Hannah is currently studying and working in Liverpool, UK where she'll (hopefully) by graduating with a degree in Drama & International Studies in 2014 and moving on to find her place in the "real world". She's also planning her wedding to her true love Jacob, to take place shortly after! In her free time, she likes cooking, baking, ballet dancing, working on her own blog, anything to do with horses, reading (mostly sic-fi and fantasy, although she sometimes enjoys more realistic stories) and playing the piano. She's particularly interested in vegan food & beauty, as well as planning a vegan wedding, so you can expect plenty of UK-related posts in those categories!
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Very nice! I´m really looking forward to next posts about this topic. I really wanna be a vegan (just eggs from grandfathers yard are against it). So it´s really interesting :)
I’m planning my own vegan wedding at the moment. We pretty much began the same way (budget, venue, guest list, food, etc.), and we’re very much still in the process. I look forward to your next posts, hoping to get some inspiration!
One comment on the whole cake issue. We’re actually much less concerned about it. I would probably also have a hard time finding a bakery that could do an enormous vegan cake, but because we have already settled on having lots of small and different cakes it won’t be a problem. Many of our vegan friends are excellent bakers, but they couldn’t handle making one of the great tiered wedding cakes. Instead, we’re hoping a couple of people can contribute with different flavored cakes and designs. The proud bakers will feel very involved, and all non-vegans will get to try a whole variety! In trying to make this cake buffet look amazing, I’m going to make my own tiered cake stands for cookies and such: http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/how-to-make-your-own-diy-vintage-plate-tiered-dessert-stand-apartment-therapy-tutorial-190649
My fiancé and I are also vegan and trying to plan a vegan wedding for October. After looking at a few venues, to keep the (limited) budget reasonable and have control over food (plus unlimited time), we are having the wedding in his father’s backyard. It’s not beautiful, but his father was married there last fall and they made it look really nice and wedding-y. It’ll add stress in some areas but relieve stress in others. I’m still not sure what to do about food. There just aren’t any local vegan caterers that I trust to pay top dollar for. We’re catering to a mostly southern, meat and potatoes crowd, so the food needs to be tricky, or otherwise recognizable and delicious. I’m thinking heavy hors d’oeuvres, but there’s still the issue of coming up with recipes and who to make them. Being a cake decorator by profession, I was excited to go cake tasting. However, I’m not particularly fond of the local vegan cakes I’ve tried. I may wind up having to make the cake/cupcakes myself. There’s a lot to do, for sure! Aside from all of the obvious, I’ve also learned a few things about cruelty free decor and such that I hadn’t considered before this journey. It’s not going to be easy, but I know it’ll all work out in the end.
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