IDEAS FOR YOUR DIY WEDDING

Over the past 10 years Karen and I have catered over 400 weddings from North Yorkshire to North London and in that time, we’ve met some VERY creative people with equally creative ideas. It’s no great surprise I guess – the food served by Kemp & Kemp Catering is always designed around each and every couple and is crafted to reflect each couple’s personalities, likes, influences and idiosyncrasies – like the time Karen managed to create a menu to reflect (in equal measure) Persia, Yorkshire and Australia! Now you wouldn’t get that with a Menu A, Menu B approach!

Naturally, with such individualism, we’ve also seen uniquely lateral approaches to other aspects of wedding plans, including what one might think are quite mundane things like guest place-names.

The first of two that really stand out were the couple who used little Lego people. They bought 80 different characters each reflecting the professions and background of their guests. The huge range of characters available allowed for office workers, farmers, dog-owners, medical people, stockbrokers, gardeners, astronauts – and with their names written on little bases, it was the perfect solution that really showed care and thought for each guest as well as a talking point for guests who had never met – “so let me guess what you do for a living”.

DIY Wedding Ideas
DIY Wedding Ideas

Another brilliant idea at another very memorable wedding was to spell out guest’s names in Scrabble letters arranged on the little tile holders you can get. This was well received by guests who of course thought the place names were solely so they could find their places! Once they’d found their places, they all then proceeded to re-arrange the letters to spell out the most outrageous variants, many of them unprintable here! All hilarious, until the waiting staff came to find ‘Lucy Davies’ eating the beef on table 7, only to find ‘devil saucy’- – and then we found ‘tumeric wash’ – formerly ‘Marcus White’ sitting next to her.

This made the food service slightly less than the smooth, unobtrusive job it normally is when we can find people in the midst of a Medieval barn with no problem at all.

We’ve had names on ivy leaves (that all blew away), place names in marquetry (for every single guest – the groom was starting his own business!) as well as more conventional approaches, but I still think it was the Lego people that was my all-time fave – at least so far!

 

Richard and Karen