Remembering your wedding day with videos and photos – plan my wedding

Wedding videos photos
Of course you will have your photographs, and possibly a video film, of all stages of the wedding and reception, both formal and informal, to help you capture the flavour of every moment of your wedding day. However, there are also plenty of other ways of helping you remember the things that made the day special – the details of the preparations, the goodwill messages of your guests, scraps of fabric from the bride’s and bridesmaids’ gowns, and flowers from your bouquets.

Keepsake books
These books can be bought ready prepared with boxes for you to fill in with all the details of your wedding – who the bridesmaids were, what the bride’s mother wore, what flowers were in the bouquets, etc – or you could make your own from a large scrapbook or blank photo album. In this you can include scraps of the relevant fabrics, planning sketches of the dresses and colour schemes, photos of the church flowers, drawings of your church, details of any disasters, pictures of the cake, a few dried flowers from your bouquet, etc, samples of your wedding stationery – anything that helps evoke the atmosphere of the day and all the preparations for it.

Guest books
Once again, you can either buy one of these specially printed, or can make your own and circulate it during the wedding reception. Each page will have a few boxes or sections where each guest can write a goodwill message – serious or silly – for the newly married couple. In years to come you will be able to browse through the album and recall the day even more clearly.

Embroidered samplers
One very lovely way to remember your wedding day is by embroidering a sampler. This doesn’t need to be very complicated; its complexity can be decided by your sewing skills! Kits can be bought that provide a pattern (or the outside borders and decorations and then alphabet instructions so that you can include your own names and the date, or you could design your own sampler from scratch and incorporate details that are particularly relevant to you, for instance including a monogram, or embroidering some of the flowers that were in your bouquet.

Flower collages
Fresh flowers are wonderful on the day itself, but inevitably they soon lose their bloom and scent. However, it is possible to have your flowers preserved in various ways so that you still have a vivid reminder of their beauty. Many firms these days will make a collage from dried blooms from your bouquet, perhaps including a small cameo wedding picture or mounting the collage on a piece of the same fabric as your wedding dress. Or you can dry your bouquet yourself by placing it in a shoebox full of silica gel crystals and leaving it until all the moisture has been absorbed by the crystals. Alternatively you could have a replica made in silk flowers of your wedding bouquet, which would capture the colours without the problem of dealing with fresh flowers.

Remembering the day-Anniversaries

Anniversaries
Of course one of the best ways of remembering your wedding day is to celebrate your wedding anniversaries as they come along. Use this day to recall all the good things about your marriage – past and present – and to reassess it and take stock of your relationship to prepare for the year ahead. Each wedding anniversary has a specific title – chosen traditionally to replace the wedding gifts that would have worn out by that particular year! You might want to choose an appropriate gift for each other for each one.