Wedding Recap: Details

From the early stages of wedding planning we decided there would be an emphasis on simplicity. This made it easy to cut out a lot of extra things we didn't care for (like favours, aisle decorations and elaborate centrepieces). But there are still a few details worth a mention.

My parents made the arch a couple of hours before the ceremony, based on a photo I'd found during the early inspiration-gathering phase of wedding planning. The bamboo was borrowed from a family friend and the vines were liberated from my parents garden. I didn't see the finished product until the ceremony started, and I love how it turned out!

Before planning a wedding I could recognise and name about five types of flowers. Now I can probably do seven. In other words, flowers weren't a bid deal for me! This made it hard to make a decision about what I wanted, I just knew that it would be simple. I eventually decided on peonies and hydrangeas, then had to think of an alternative a week before the wedding when I found out there were no hydrangeas in the country.

I wasn't too worried becuase to me all flowers are nice, and the carnations I ended up choosing looked pretty good. The family friend who made the bouquets had also arranged flowers for my parent's wedding thirty years ago, so it was nice to have that connection.

While we were signing the register and making it legal, the guests passed the rings around for a ring warming ceremony. We had a lot of comments from guests who had never heard of it before, and thought it was a really nice part of the ceremony. (The other part of the ceremony a lot of guests loved was the line in our vows where we promised "to grow old disgracefully together"!)

We decided early on that spending hundreds of dollars on a professionally made wedding cake was out of the question, so Owen volunteered to make it. He spent the months leading up to the wedding trying various recipes, baked it the day before, and iced it the morning of the wedding. It was a two-layered white chocolate gateau, and it was delicious!

Inspired by Cate, I spent a few months before the wedding sourcing old photos to make into a photo book for our guests to sign. It's a really good keepsake, I love reading the messages and laughing at old photos (the oldest were from 1999 when we first got together).


The details were nice, but I'd decided that as long as I was married to Owen by the end of the day I'd be happy. Luckily pretty much everything else worked out as well!

Photos by Stacy Squires and our families