It’s my belief that just about anything you love can be incorporated into your wedding and today’s Ask Ms Polka Dot is all about incorporating something that is slightly offbeat, something that is not normally seen at a wedding and having fun with it anyway! Have a wedding query of your own? Email me!

Ms Polka Dot,

I’m hoping you can help me. My fiance (Ross) and I are trying to plan a fun outdoor vintage gamer wedding, but we’re not sure where to start. An inspiration board would help us out a ton.

The wedding will be in late summer. For colors we’d like to use greens and blues, with gold accents. I love vintage bottles and glassware, and I have a few items I plan to use as centerpieces or with favors. We’re both avid gamers, and we want to include or xbox obsession without being cheesy. A few food ideas we have are lemonade, smores, and barbecue. I plan to make my bouquet out of paper roses. They’ll be printed with lyrics of songs that mean a great deal to us. Early in our relationship, we would each suggest songs for the other to listen to. Ross also plays guitar. We’d like to incorporate lyrics and guitar picks into other aspects of the wedding.

As you can probably tell we are a bit all over the place. We want the wedding to be really personal, but we don’t want to overdo things. An inspiration board, or any advice you could give us would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks so much for your time!
Hello!

How to incorporate vintage touches into a wedding with XBox/gamer touches? You have certainly posed a challenging question!

Your paper bouquet could be made out of music sheets, along with the other paper colours you wish to use, to incorporate Ross’ love of music.

I would keep your greens and blues soft and slightly greyer in tone to give your wedding a feminine and elegant feel. These tones look more elegant and less ‘carnival’ than a bright green and a bright blue used together with gold. Your vintage bottles could pick up these watery hues used in groups on the tables, some filled with simple stems of flowers. Your tablecloths could be white with your blue and green colours used in over cloths to add colour. You could keep your crockery white with stainless steel cutlery, and perhaps add some soft blue or green candles amongst the vintage bottles as your table centrepieces. Keep your flowers something simple  like daisies, or baby’s breath or simply make more paper flowers to use in their stead.

Your invitations could feature lines from your favourite songs scattered randomly over them, or you could print or handwrite those lyrics on fabric ribbon, which you could tie onto your invitations, favour boxes, or around some of your bottles.

You could also make bunting yourself featuring images of xbox characters set in amongst flags featuring your lyrics. These could be printed onto scrapbooking paper in your blues and greens and either attached to the above fabric ribbon, or brown twine.

Your barbecue could be set up buffet style with your accompaniments such as salads etc on a table for guests to help themselves. However, if you are considering a barbecue, make sure that the food is memorable – not just the plain old stuff we do everyday. Discuss with your caterer, some ways to jazz up your barbecue offerings to make them really special. Different ways to flavour your meats, different ways to present your dishes, and different meats/seafood – you are doing this for your wedding, so you want a touch of elegance! Offer some fancy salads along with the old stalwarts of potato salad, green salad – e.g. think different ingredients, such as pear, blue cheese and walnut and rocket salad. There are many exciting ways you could make these a stand out for your guests.

You mention lemonade – how about setting it up to look like an old fashioned lemonade stand. You could include other drinks here as well – grapefruit juice, cranberry juice, for those who don’t want to drink alcohol. Think glass jugs, dishes of  lemon slices, orange slices, fresh cranberries, mint, other fresh fruit for guests to float in their drinks, paper straws.  Even vintage glass punch bowls, or juice dispensers would look great here.

Another table set up with your desserts and choice of toppings could also add to the casual feel e.g. an ice-cream/sorbet table with the toppings of your choice. Or you could do large platters filled with a choice of desserts set in the middle of each guests’ table, so that guests could pick and choose and help themselves. Your s’mores could be served at this point along with slices of tart, cake, tartlets, etc. Or your s’mores could be served with a mug of hot cocoa to your guests before they depart for the night.

As a nod to your ‘gaming obsession’ you could incorporate the game controller into your invitation design even folding it – for instance the ‘wings of the controller could fold inwards, you could use characters as cake toppers and funny little favours, you could even have your cake made in the shape  of your game controller or a favourite character. You could  set up a photo booth for your guests, with props so that your guests could ‘become’ the characters of your favourite games.

Have a great wedding day!