The Great Big Wedding Post

Our wedding was held three weeks ago at Victoria Park, Sydney. It's a beautiful big park just up the road from where we lived when we first met six years ago. We got engaged two months before moving to the Philippines, so I planned most of the wedding in that time. It was fun to plan and ended up being a fun, happy and relaxing day. All of the beautiful photos were taken by my brother, Mark. He's actually a pilot but he somehow finds time to also be a really great photographer. You can check out his flickr photos here.



I designed and printed our own invitations to look like old library books.



This is my bridesmaid, Jess, and I hanging out in a park (not the 'wedding park') before the wedding. I normally like being ready early and arrive places exactly on time, so this whole 'the bride is always late' thing was pretty frustrating to me. Of course she turns up last - she has to wait until everyone else is at the ceremony site and ready to go!



This little dog came to say hello while we were waiting. Note the pretty bouquets - Jess and I made our own. I love how they turned out! This is also a good point to mention my shoes. They were made by Golden Ponies, who I have raved about on here before - it is my absolute favourite brand of shoes to buy from. Thank you, Erandi, for making such cute, comfortable and affordable wedding shoes! Everyone was complimenting them.



...and we're off! Here's my dad and I walking down the aisle - well, across the park anyway.



Our gorgeous wedding spot. We 'planted' hundreds of fake flowers in the ground to create an 'aisle' and it looked amazing! The flowers, chairs and lots of other decorations all came from IKEA - I used to work there before I moved here.



We ended up with a perfect day, weather-wise, but there was just a bit of wind!



Discussing how to go about cutting the cake - this was deemed necessary after my brother's wedding last year. He and his wife tried to cut into the cake and discovered that the icing was very thick and completely solid, resulting in hilarious photos of him hacking into his wedding cake with a very determined look on his face!



A close up of our lovely book cake made by Glamour Cakes. It was so exciting when the cake arrived, the house just filled with the smell of sugar! It tasted amazing too. The chess piece cake toppers were partly inspired by our tradition of playing chess on holidays, and partly by me thinking 'hmmm, maybe we should have cake toppers... these will do!'
We had the cake and a champagne toast in the park after the wedding ceremony, like a nice afternoon picnic!



After mingling with our guests for awhile, we headed off to take photos around the park.



As I've mentioned before, I made my own dress. I'm so happy with how it turned out! My mum made my veil.





Jess and I were determined to play on the swing set in our pretty dresses. I love this photo with the boys holding our bouquets!



Walking down Glepe Point Rd to our reception at Sappho, a beautiful little second hand bookshop with a cafe & bar out the back. They serve tapas for dinner at night, and they created a delicious tapas menu for our reception that kept everyone very happy all night. I'm still thinking about all that good food!











Our 'guest book' was a library catalogue drawer with dividers that said things like 'Advice for a happy marriage', 'Good jokes', 'Things James should know about Ali'/'Things Ali should know about James' etc. People got really enthusiastic about filling out little index cards and filing them into categories, and they were hilarious to read the next day!



We did our dance to 'You Never Can Tell' by Chuck Berry, inspired of course by the twist scene with John Travolta and Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction. This photo captures all the things I love about Sappho - books, plants, coloured lights, and crazy graffiti all over the walls.



Like any good party, everyone went home with a lolly bag. I may have taken two...