OK so I'm a bride on a total money saving mission....our whole wedding budget is roughly £1000
This particular idea is to do with our evening reception...which we can Taylor make to do our budget.
So im literrally in bed lying awake unabe to sleep for whatever reason and i start thinking about the wedding. One thing I didn't want to do is to just buy a bunch of food from a local shop but that's beginning to look the case, I was thinking of bbumping it up a bit with some home cooking and cakes made by me,
But....my absolutely random but I reckon quite good idea, is to turn it into a 'pot luck' kind of thing where guests can bring in some food to share and of course I will bump it up a bit with food from us...just by going with food from us rather than be catered by the venue we will save roughly £200

I just wondered what peoples opinions were on this, how do you think the guests will react?
Xxx

its an idea but do you really think that guests will want to turn up and sit through your ceremony with a plate of sausages rolls on their lap ? also you would need to be careful that you didn`t end up with lots of the same thing .....

ie 27 plates of sarnies and one cheesecake lol

Yes you need to ask around first to see what the reaction will be - or have you thought about having an evening buffet and in the afternoon something like afternoon tea with finger sandwiches, cake etc or more picnic style? If you have a cash and carry near you too like Cost co see if you can get cold meats etc from them as they work out cheaper, we do this every Christmas - and look into M & S, as they can do party platters which you can order in advance and the prices aren't too bad :-)

Or, if your wedding is early, you could actually do what they do in the States and have your wedding, then go off for a celebratory lunch with your immediate family and start the reception at say 6pm with drinks, speeches and an evening buffet - this way you don't need to feed everybody twice?

I am going to buy a whole bunch of buffet stuff from iceland and top it up with sandwiches and rolls from m&s. I think the idea of a bring and share wedding is a nice idea, but not very garuanteed and i would worry about there not being enough food, though would possibly be proved there was nothing to worry about on the day and all would be fine, i would still be worried in the lead up if you get what i mean?

It sounds like a good idea to ask your close friends and family to bring a plate rather than a wedding gift. To make sure you dont end up with loads of the same foods, i would tell each persOn what to bring with them =).
We are doing our own buffet and asking our close family to help with the cooking, which most of them jumped at the chance to do. Its a great way of saving some money when you are on a tight budget!. A few months ago i bought some large white plastic platters to serve the food on, and will be sharing them between the family members who are cooking, that way you have an idea how much food each platter can hold xx

This idea was just for the evening do so there won't be guests with food on their laps during the ceremony, it would be something they bring in the gap between the wedding and reception. All of our guests live locally and will be going back to their homes to change/ put kids to bed etc
Anyway after eventually getting some sleep I woke up with the same thoughts as have been expressed here, which means yes it was a random idea but there's too many nitty gritty to sort out.....imagine if everyone turned up with sausage rolls :-/
My decision process normally works like this...I come up with an idea, spend all night thinking about it, if I find too many possible problems I scrap it.
But I will be doing food from iceland instead of paying the venue to do it :-) thank you everyone for your thoughts and help x

Its not a complete write off when my sister got married she had the traditional wedding breakfast but we all had to pay for our own as she too was on a £1000 budget.
I completely agree though that you would either have to assign guests something to bring or have a list of everything needed but they choose what they want to bring. It would also need to be labelled as already said too.

no i dont like it! i wud just do buffet ureself! for h2b 21st bday few years ago me n mil did his buffet was massive and was under £200 and loads went to waste too x

We're on a tight budget too and the lady who runs the social club where our reception is is doing our food (my mum would say "she does a lovely spread!") lol. Anyway, she normally charges a fiver a head but that's beyond us unfortunately with 150 people coming so we've agreed £300 and H2B is doing a massive pot of curry the night before at my mums to take up on the morning.

I do like the idea of bring a dish though. :0) Like the others have said, you can do a good buffet under £200.xx

we will be having a buffet for our wedding meal at about 4pm, then hog roast will be served at 8 :D

made the rice crispy cakes myself tho hehe as well as the two cakes either side of my birthday cake x

fab idea, you could structure it by asking them to bring something from a certain food group ie pastries, sarnies, puddings, canapes etc etc etc

its a HUGE thing in america!

Very cool idea! :) Xx