I think my ultimate wedding location would be to have it at home. So imagine if your parents happened to own oh I don’t know…. a WINERY. What’s that? On the pristine South Coast of New South Wales? Hmm, yes I think that would do.
Well that’s exactly the case for Tom Cupitt whose family-run Cupitt’s Winery and Restaurant is located on the east coast of Australia a few hours south of Sydney (one of those places that you look down on during flights from Melbourne to Sydney and you think – I wish I was lucky enough to live in an idyllic place like this!). It is quite simply the perfect setting for a rural Australian wedding and it would have been lots of fun for them to have free reign on the place! And as if Libby and Tom weren’t lucky enough by having a winery on hand for the wedding but Libby also made a great friend at uni, Elise Hassey, who is an incredible photographer. She’s captured the day so well with a mix of intimate photos and some breathtaking photos of the winery. Libby describes Elise as not in your face, like a commando with a camera!
Add to all this a beautiful bride, a trumpet-playing groom, stylish bridemaids and a family of DIY extraordinaires and you have a fun-filled magical weekend of celebrations. In fact I love so many stories and photos from the day that it’s going to take me THREE days to get through them all.
I start the Libby and Tom blog-athon with the pre-ceremony where we settle on in with Libby and her besties. Libby has provided us with a running commentary of the day – so over the next three days I’m sure you’ll feel like you were actually there to share the good times!
I got my dress made in London by Carla Kirste. I really wanted a short dress and struggled to find anything that was not tea length and/or with a billowing skirt. Or super short. My BM who lived in London and the flowergirls worked with me very hard to come up with the design I wanted. We trawled through wedding blogs picking dresses we liked and then I met up with Carla and pulled them all together. Carla was great, she could draw up exactly what I wanted and I decided to buy my material in Paris – the joys of living in London!
Shoe searching was pretty traumatic. They are pretty important when you have a short dress but I also had a fiancee who was 1-2cm shorter than me. It is a lot worse than it sounds! There is not a very good market out there for low heel shoes or nice flats. I ended up ordering a pair to be made in the states that had a thickish heel and when they arrived I was surprised that they were all patent leather but they worked out (I think they’re gorgeous and they’re from the randomest of random sites called
Sister’s Dress – check out some of the dresses!!)
. I changed into a pair of white satin ballet shoes from Blochs for the dancing part of the night.
Instead of having young girls as flowergirls, Libby chose to have friends. I think they looked like a pair of nymphs with their fresh flower halos.
Libby took a trip down to the flower market in Sydney to buy up big on flowers to decorate (a great way to save a few $$$). A local florist made up the bouquets, corsages and buttonholes – the bouquets look so fresh with their mix of roses, ranunculus and lisianthus buds.
The bridesmaids. Oh the bridemaids! Libby’s brief for the bridemaids was: short dress, not bright, pink, cream, blush tones, can be plain or have a print. It sounded like an easy enough brief but I think a million emails were passed around. When my sister wanted a gold sequin dress I told her it was a vineyard not a casino – but she got it anyway because she loved it and it looked awesome! We all had no idea what each other’s dresses were until the day of the wedding.
You’ll remember
my recent post on mix and match bridemaids? Well these girls are mixy and matchy to PERFECTION! They’ve worked within the designated colour palette and it all gels together perfectly while each of them has a unique look.
And the beautiful bride…. I’ve told you a little bit about the dress already but she also had the cutest little birdcage veil from a store on
Etsy. I love how perfectly it sits over the top of her fringe (that would be bangs for ya’ll in America).
It’s good to see below that even short wedding dresses are hard to get into and require a bit of bridesmaid adjusting!
And just when you thought that Libby and Tom couldn’t have any more amazing friends? Well one of Libby’s good friends (
Kate McCoy) is a jewelry designer who not only designed both of the wedding rings (more about that in tomorrow’s post) but she also made bangles for the bridesmaids from Libby which had engraved a nickname for them then the words love, gratitude, laughter. Such a good keepsake!
Well that’s got us to the point of having a bride ready to go meet her groom. I can’t wait to share with you the ceremony tomorrow – there are PLENTY more stories and photos to come!
Tags: Blochs, Carla Kirste, Cupitt's Winery and Restaurant, Elise Hassey, Flowers by Stacy, Kate McCoy
