Standon Calling is a small festival located in the village of Standon, Hertfordshire.“We started with just 25 friends, a swimming pool, a set of decks and a birthday BBQ.”
But our story is that of a wedding. Or should I say, a hen do…
Months and months of planning by 6 bridesmaids desperately trying to organise a group of 10 girls ready for a festival, all while keeping everything schtum from the bride-to-be, really did take it out of us, but it was totally worth it, I mean look how happy we all are! ^^
Special kudos should go out to Lucy and Sarah for making these t-shirts – that’s right, we even made our own tie dye hen-branded tops!
This year Standon Calling ran from Friday 1st August – Sunday 3rd August.
We all made our way up to Hertfordshire Friday afternoon, departing from various places across the south of England and arriving in dribs and drabs throughout the afternoon. Jess and I arrived first, so we jumped in the queue (which was already ginormous) picked up our wristbands (a whole 2 or 3 hours later – yawn) and by that point some of the others had started to arrive. We took one for the team and lugged as many of the tents in as we could whilst everyone was still queuing and grabbed a spot to pitch them.
Long story short I had pizza.
Well, I shared pizza with Laura K, but we both decided we could’ve easily eaten a whole one. Ah well!
After food we explored the festival. Clean Bandit were headlining on the main stage on Friday.
There were lots of little quirky shops/stalls which I LOVE.
Here’s the bride-to-be (left) with her future sister in law testing out some potential styles for the big day…
We headed back to the stage after a bit of window shopping, to watch Frank Turner.
After Frank we explored a bit more, found a painted tree…
I feel a little bit like I want all trees to be painted now, I mean how good does that look?!
A little while later we headed back up to our little camp, and a little while after that we eventually headed off to bed.
It rained a little during the day so we couldn’t venture out to do a great deal, but thankfully the rain had stopped by late afternoon and we cracked out the face paints. This years theme at Standon Calling was ‘Lost in Latin America’, so most of us went with a kind of Sugar Skull look…
After a few drinks we headed down to the festival.
Today was all about macaroni cheese.
This stuff was seriously good, and yes that is bacon you’re seeing on top.
We then stumbled across a little moroccan themed tent called Happy Hookahs, which had a really nice chilled out atmosphere and a couple of people singing. We had a bit of a relax in there for a while, then headed back out.
Saturday was such a good night, after everybody had left the main stage, we headed over to the second stage where DJ Yoda was doing a set. I’d never heard of him before, but he was amazing, there were loads of old songs, theme tunes and samples from the 80s, 90s, 00s and more, it was so much fun.
There were 4 of us left by the end of the night and by the time we got to bed our heads hit the pillow and we fell asleep instantly, it was the best night sleep of all 3 nights!
Yes that dog has a onesie on..!
I was so looking forward to this, but it was actually a little short and although they were giving out rosettes for the winners of each category, we could barely hear what they were saying which was a shame, so we had no idea what categories any of the dogs were winning!Nevertheless we made use of our time afterwards by taking some bride and bridesmaid photobooth pics 😉
Next we headed across to the shops and stalls, one of which did glitter face painting…
We posed for some bride tug of war…
Had some food…
And then made our way back up to camp.
We had some drinks and then made our way back down to the festival to enjoy our last night at Standon…
