Afternoon Tea - buying teapots/cakestands etc

Me and h2b are having a traditional english afternoon tea to greet our guests at the venue for the first hour. We're getting married in NJ, in the United States so I think the theme will go down really well. However, the venue doesnt have plain white tea pots, sugar bowls, milk jugs etc. They only have plastic caffetieres used to keep coffee hot and they certainly dont have any three tier cake stands.

So we priced everything up for each table and worked out we can just about afford the teapots, sugar bpwls and milk jugs, but the cake stands are turning out to be very expensive. We were planning on having one per table but cant afford it so just want to know do you think it would look bad to have two cake stands on the top table only? Then the venue could just serve platters of the sandwiches and cakes to the rest of the tables....

I'd love to hear from anyone who had afternoon tea and how you went about hiring/buying all of the equipment... And if you bought it, did you find it easy to re-sell it on afterwards?

Thank you!

you could make cake stands, i made one from some picnic plates and an eye bolt. my brother asked me where i had bought it from as he wanted one too.

we are doing afternoon tea as well. i think we are going for cakestands on each table but not nice teapots, milk jugs and sugar bowls as i think the tiered cakestnads are more of a talking point.

the caterers are walking around serving tea anyway so dont need post teapots necessarily (just plain white ceramic ones)

it is clearly the best way of having tea and cake at a wedding!!

Hiya, love this idea!

Just came across this website...

http://www.theenglishteaparty.co.uk/default.asp?pageID=1

xxx