Ever After office party
I love to take the opportunity of the Ever After elopement office Christmas party to showcase the talents of our amazing team. To show people what we can really do and the incredible talent behind our hand picked team of wedding professionals.
If you didn’t see last year’s party, (where have you been?) you can catch up here. There’s even a lil film of the 2017 evening you can see at the end of that blog post.
So this year I wanted the set up to have a completely different look. Of course it’s Christmas so we’re going to have a Christmas tree and fairy lights (I think it’s the law anyway) but Amanda Randell and I got together over a cuppa a few weeks ahead of time and decided we were going to go with white and snowballs. Fab.
elopement florist
Our elopement florist Amanda Randell was in charge of the centrepiece both hanging and on the table. I set to gather the rest of what we needed for styling the table. This year we used our silver grey table linen as the under cloth for the main table with our white sequin tablecloth (which just happened to have sequin circles which were perfect for the snowball look). On top of that our silver chargers, crystal glasses and a load of our silver, white and frosted tea lights. Last year I bought all the guests furry hot water bottles. This year it was snow globes. I had such fun finding all the different ones – love a gift. I placed one on each charger and Amanda had arranged the place names which I’d asked for on grey card with white writing. I added some thin silver grey velvet ribbon I had in my vast ribbon box (everyone has one of those right?) and the table was good to go for Amanda to add her centrepiece and shake out that faux snow.
Amanda’s centrepiece is typical of one of her original, creative pieces. Crafted from a real silver birch branch, she added little feet for stability so that it stood solidly on the table. Then she drilled holes in the branch (that woman loves a power tool) for candles and also the cutest little christmas trees which she made herself using wire and long cinnamon sticks for the tree trunks.
The hanging arrangement over the table (these always look amazing so I recommend them if you can find a way to have something hanging over the centre of the table) was made from catkin branches our handyman Pete cut from our woods. They were attached to the oak beams on the terrace with wire. Amanda hung clear icicles from the branches and added them to the Christmas tree too. Then we hung some mini snowball garlands I’d picked up from Guernsey when I was visiting my sister the other week. As soon as I saw them, I knew they’d be perfect and at £5 a garland, a complete barg. Finally we added a string of a few hundred fairy lights and ta da, the space was transformed.
I’ve had these little metal houses for a few years now, I think they originally came from Cox & Cox. I often use them in the elopement wedding styling with seasonal flowers. For Christmas they’ve got real white Christmas roses (Hellebores) and white heather. With the tiny strings of battery lights and some of our LED candles, they look uber Christmassy.
Clare Kinchin our fab elopement photographer came and took all these gorgeous photos. We also had the lovely Baxter & Ted along to film the evening so you’ll see that soon.
Cocktails
Bethany was in charge of cocktails. I said they had to go with the theme (of course!) so she came up with a gin based limoncello cocktail which we served in gin balloons and then two champagne cocktails with elderflower liqueur and edible glitter, one white and one silver – so cool!
Harrie our talented elopement chef and cake maker of Boo To A Goose brought dessert – you so need friends like Harrie. She’d definitely got the memo on the theme and bought an amazing snowball cake in a super refined and elegant way. Actually it was dessert disguised as cake as it was a sticky toffee cake with ginger and decorated with edible confetti. It tasted even better than it looked if that’s possible…
We also had our dream elopement film makers Baxter + Ted do us a mini film of the party which you can see below…
So it’s cheers and Happy Christmas to all of you from the Ever After elopement team! We’ve had lots of super amazing elopement weddings here in 2018 (check out our real elopements page for lots of fab elopement pics of our real weddings) and we’re looking forward to plenty more in 2019. If you’d like to have all this talent working for your elopement wedding – get in touch! I’d love to hear from you, drop me a line at [email protected] – don’t forget we’re closed now til 3rd January.
