Squeallll, our lovely Laura married her Pete last month :-)) congratulations you two!! Laura and Pete had a legal ceremony before their big wedding celebration, and today i get to share it with you. They had the most special and personal day, getting ready together, heading off to their local registry office and stopping off for afternoon tea with their loved ones for a mini reception. Laura looks so beautiful in blue, with her floral crown and that amazing bolero (you won’t believe where she found it!) and i love Pete’s bow tie. Beautiful images from the wonderful Hannah Millard Photography capture these two perfectly. Enough from me, I’m getting emotional, lets hear from Laura :-) XOXO Lou

Hello everyone. I’m back and I’m married. Hooray!

I’m writing this on the M4 after heading back from a relaxing honeymoon week in Wales. It rained and rained and rained but that didn’t matter a bit as we had a wood burning stove and an ample supply of left over wedding wine.

Today I want to share my legal wedding. When planning our wedding Pete and I knew that we really wanted to have an outdoor ceremony and, unfortunately, it’s not possible to do this legally in England but there are ways around this.

We decided to get legally married at our local registry office a few days before the wedding and then have a celebrant led wedding ceremony at our wedding.

We’d always been pretty clear that we didn’t want to make a big thing out of the legal bit. We wouldn’t exchange rings, we would only invite our immediate family and we would, to all intents and purposes, just be doing the paperwork.

After some discussion though we decided that it would be nice to take our family out for afternoon tea after the legal ceremony, to thank them for their support.

As it got closer to the day, we realised that while it wasn’t the main event, it was still a pretty momentous part of the process so we decided it would also be nice to have this part of proceedings photographed.

Luckily our wonderful photographer and friend Hannah was able to photograph the legal bit for us as well as the main wedding and it was great to have her there to share it with us.

On the day of the legal bit we got up, has a lovely breakfast of eggs benedict and coffee and then we got ready at home together while drinking a few glasses of champagne.

This was one of the loveliest parts of the day for me and I understand that it’s traditional for the bride and groom to be apart before the wedding but I loved sharing this part of the day with Pete.

I wore a blue dress along with shoes from Marks and Spencers that were specially customised for me by Rene Walrus. My flower crown was created by The Vintage Floral Design company for a photoshoot that we worked on together and Gwenda was kind enough to let me keep it. My gold bolero was bought 2nd hand on eBay and came from Primark originally . Good old Primark!

Both the bolero and shoes were bought for the main wedding but worked well with my blue dress. My necklace had a B (for Babb) on it and was symbolic of the fact that I didn’t (and still haven’t!) changed my name. I wrote a post explaining my reasons for this a while ago and you can find it here: http://whimsicalwonderlandweddings.com/2012/01/the-bride-diaries-discussion-lauras-something-new.html

Anyway once we were ready-ish Hannah came to meet us at home before we left for the registry office, as we thought it would be fun to get some pictures on the way.

We live in Camden so there are loads of places for interesting pictures and we walked down through the Stables market and then to a flower stall to buy the sunflower I used as my bouquet.

I especially love the shots Hannah took on the tube. As a photographer myself it was really important that the pictures of our wedding were right and Hannah captured it perfectly. She’s lovely to have around too and a very calming presence.

So when the pictures done, we headed off to the registry office. The ceremony was short, sweet and a lot more emotional than I expected it to be. Pete and I both welled up, which was really unexpected given that it was such a brief ceremony but as you repeat your legal vows to each other it really does feel as though you’re doing something life changing.

And then we were married.

We and headed off to Drink, Shop, Do for drinks and afternoon tea.

What started off being a formality ended up being a lovely, intimate and very special day. I was initially unhappy that we couldn’t do the whole wedding in one go but on reflection it was so nice to have something small and low key that was just about the two of us, rather than being about a wedding. And of course technically I had two weddings, which was a lot of fun.

So that was my legal bit. I loved it. I’ll be back with my full wedding write up very, very soon.

Laura x

Credit where credit is due…

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