Why We Wed

I've been following Liz at Happy Sighs for ages, and have been finding her Why We Wed series really interesting. So interesting in fact that I wanted to be part of it.

Liz was kind enough to let me share my thoughts, hop on over to take a look!

Highlights: Wedding

Feathers in My Cap

• Waking up next to Owen and realising that this was the day
• The weather clearing up and the clouds disappearing just as the ceremony was due to start
• The huge amount of help we had from friends and family, especially our parents
• Laughing with Owen just before the ceremony began and feeling my nerves disappear
• A lot of comments about our vows, which I'd spent ages working on over the last few months
• The delicious white chocolate gateau cake that Owen made
• The surprise package that our parents had left for us at the hotel
• Waking up the next morning and relaxing in the sun, listening to the sea, and eating chocolate

Black Eyes

• A lot of the guests getting sunburnt when the weather turned out to be nicer than expected
• Putting off writing our thank you speech until the morning of the wedding
• Our dog escaping while we were getting ready and eating one of Ma's chickens
• Not having enough time to really catch up with everyone

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

Wedding Recap: Photos

We had some time after the ceremony for some photos, followed by a picnic by the sea, followed by more photos. I hadn't been able to eat anything beforehand (I was much too nervous) so I was ravenous by picnic time. Luckily my wild-eyed, food-demanding self wasn't captured on film!

Once we'd had some food and I was ready to smile again Owen and I took a walk along the rocks, and then we headed to another beach for some more photos with the rest of the wedding party.

Once we'd driven back to the reception venue there was time for even more photos at the beach across the road. It turns out our photographer was a Beatles fan, so we indulged him on our walk back to the hall.

All photos by Stacy Squires

Wedding Recap: Ceremony

My favourite part of the wedding day was definitely the ceremony. I was so nervous beforehand, mainly because there was going to be over a hundred people staring at me during a very important moment in my life! Also the weather that morning was a little touch and go. Clouds kept rolling in and covering the mountains and the wind was starting to pick up. Luckily five minutes before the ceremony started the sun came out and the wind dropped, conditions were perfect. I was still really nervous though, I just wanted to see Owen already!

One Day by Opshop arranged & performed by Nancy Brough

When I was standing next to Owen my nerves mostly disappeared. I realised the crowd was full of family and friends who really wanted to be there with us, and after months of planning we were finally getting married!

Writing the ceremony was my favourite part of wedding planning. When I'd had enough of flowers and hairstyles I spent lots of time pulling together words, readings and vows, which always made me feel better. The ceremony is too long to include here, but if you'd like to read it all here it is.


All photos by Stacy Squires.

Wedding Recap: Venues

Owen and I both grew up in the same small town by the sea. This made it very easy to decide on the location for our wedding, but the venues were another story. Because the town is so small there aren't very many options!

We knew that we wanted an outdoor ceremony (despite the risk of inclement weather) and spent a while trying to find the best spot. The hardest part was trying to find somewhere relatively private but with easy access. Eventually we found the perfect place:

The reception venue was a little bit more difficult as there were hardly any places that could hold the hundred guests that we'd invited. By process of elimination we were left with only one option: the local community hall.

There were definitely some good points:

• There was a lot of history! It was the venue for our high school balls, and over the years I'd danced on the stage many times before
• The facilities were fairly good with lots of space for everything
• No real restrictions, we just had to leave the hall in the same condition as when we hired it
• A very good price! Which meant we could splash out a bit in a couple of other areas

And there was really only one bad point: the colour scheme. In the past couple of years the hall had been redecorated from nice neutral tones to a combination of green and purple (not my favourite!).

Luckily we had lots of kind helpers who spent the day before the wedding transforming it from this:

To this:

Photo Credit