Our transport on our wedding day...

Meet George, the husband of our very good friend and Mary Coad who Jo worked with back in 2009/10 .

Here he is sitting in the Hupmobile his grandparents bought in 1924 when they were married, and the car we will also sit in on our wedding day. 

You can read the full story about the history of the car here in this Shep News Article (where we also flogged this photo).

We are so pleased to have Mary and George drive around with us on our wedding day!

Vintage love

We've stopped travelling the last 3 months, mainly because Jo's had a fair amount of weekend work, but also with a view to saving for our wedding. So we banned ourselves from buying flights, no matter the temptation.

What it has meant is that we've had plenty of time to scrounge Portobello Road and surrounds and dream about all the vintage items we'd like to own one day (we are allowed to dream right?). 

We are not into the knick-knack vintage stuff what-so-ever. But old maps, leather cases and globes have fallen into our 'we must purchase before we go home' list.

We did manage to pick up these beautiful old steamer trunks which we hope we can bring at least 2 of them back for the wedding.

And even Jo's earrings have been purchased from a vintage jewellers.

Want a sneak peak?

So there be the 'theme' if you'd like to call it that.

Vintage. 

And as for the cases, every one has been lending us? It's a really nice way of us tying in one of the things we love to do. Travel!

So we've started borrowing items from everyone we know. 

If you have anything we could lend. Old hats, globes, musical instruments, boxes, wooden crates, old frames- and you'd be happy to loan them we would love you forever ( well we'll probably do that anyway!)

Also vintage fits rather nicely with our reception venue.

We decided very easily on the Yarroweyah Hall. A lot of people questioned, why we would chose a hall, not a beautiful wedding venue on the beach, or a big marquee by the river.

For us the wedding is more about the people then the place. The hall is a beautiful one, fits in our more than 150 guests, and allows us to set up the day before and pack down the day after for a totally stress free wedding day.

But that being said we really loved the thought that our money was going right back into the community AND how excited the lovely old couple were when they were showing us around the venue.

The wedding band...

Choosing a wedding band was probably one of the hardest things we had to do. Finding a band was particularly difficult as

a) We are fussy when it comes to good music, and it was important to us to get it right.

b) We couldn't just go an watch someone play as we are on the other side of the world.

c) Was almost impossible to get a band leading up to christmas.

But then by luck we found  Nicky Bomba ( and we even got to watch him and his band at Glastonbury).

Hope you have your dancing shoes ready!

Grateful

We are truly blessed.

Let me say that again.

WE ARE SO RIDICULOUSLY, OVERWHELMINGLY, LOVINGLY, AMAZINGLY BLESSED.

Organising a wedding from the other side of the world was never going to be an easy task.

Specially when Jo had hopes and dreams of it being totally DIY.

But we have the most amazing family and friends who have done everything for us, from collecting old suitcases to measuring tables, roof heights, making chutney, tasting our cake, decorating, making blackboards, learning songs for us, driving our buses, offering their vintage cars, scrounging through vintage shops to find the perfect earrings, serving at the bar, collecting old jars... and the list just keeps on going on....

It doesn't stop.

And boy are we feeling overwhelmingly grateful.

It was so important for us to have a wedding that was full to the brim with love.

So we've bundled together our talented friends and they have not battered an eyelid in their devotion to making our day super.

This is the little video we sent to our friends and family to ask for their help.

Your invites have arrived!

If you made it back to our site it means you got one of the invites in the post. Huzzah!

I thought I'd make a quick post about the invites for any of crafty friends who were wondering how we pulled together these one-of-a-kind handmade beauties.

We got a bit excited in a beautiful little paper shop in Florence while we were in Italy and bought ourselves some bronze wax and a little wax stamp of our initials.

We sat at our little kitchen table, me melting the wax ( and burning the skin off my fingers) and Brett stamping the beautiful vintage coloured papers we picked up in a shop here in London.

We couldn't chose just one paper so you could have gotten one of the three colours in the pictures below.

We then got the invite text made into a rubber stamp from a great company called Paper Sushi. The lady at Paper Sushi hand writes the invites. Which we loved! You can check out Paper Sushi here.

When they did arrive ( it was a bit of a wait), we'd managed to get our sizings a little muddled and had to make a mad dash to Paperchase  (which just quietly I think is a cool name for a paper shop) to get some more paper.

Getting the stamps right was quite a bit harder than I expected. Specially the bigger ones and there is definitely a knack to it!

We invested some serious time inking and stamping all of the main invites and RSVP cards before piling them into envelopes to make their way to you.

Below just some proof that it actually was us making them. 

Mum's making chutney

Jo's talented mother Chris, has been a super women and started to prepare chutney for our big day! 

These super cute little jars of chutney will be yours to take home as our gift to you for the day ( If Jo's Dad Ady doesn't get to them first).

How lucky are we to have such talented and thoughtful family who are pouring so much love into our wedding!

Thanks so much Mum we bet it tastes awesome and can't get home to try it!

Save the Date- Our Wedding - Saturday 6th of December 2014

Yep thats right, Jo's passed the trial run and we've finally set a date.

 Our save the date invites should be one coming across the seas into your mail box very soon.

 Here is a sneak preview...