Celebrating a December Wedding in June!

Tinker has invited everyone to celebrate the June Honeymoon with her on Saturday June 14th. After attending a lovely wedding at the end of May she has been carried away for the last two weeks on a tide of romance and thoughts of June weddings despite her own having been some other time...

Mine too. Jim and I were married in December 2000. And I never have got around to putting up photos of our own wedding, despite the fact that for a wedding the May before, where Jim was best man, we'd put up a whole load as part of their wedding present - here. So now I'm taking this opportunity to show a little of ours.

On Leap Day 2000 we were celebrating having been together for 5 years, then I proposed to Jim... and luckily he agreed ;-)

This was my second wedding so rather than white (or the nearest shade that suits me) I choose to be married in blue. I did go and try on lots of traditional dresses, I also contemplated making my own... but I ended up buying a simple long dress and was more than happy with it. I made the shawl to go with it... also a lacy cape, though I've not found any photos of that yet...

My real treat was the tiara - I'd always longed for one. It may only be a fake but what a wonderfully sparkly thing it is; I felt like a princess.

We were married in Cornwall because we both would like to live there one day; though so far that's not been possible. The actual venue was an old fort - Polhawn Fort - on Rame Head - its a bit like a big self-catering holiday cottage set-up for weddings... We hired the fort for a weekend. Various friends came with us on the Friday and we had a fun time decorating it and making it all ready for the next day. The fort sleeps over 20 so quite a few people were able to stay there, others choose to stay in nearby B&Bs. It was a long way from everyone's homes so we were very lucky that so many people choose to come!

The wedding service was conducted by the local marriage registrar... we hadn't met her before the day but we couldn't have chosen anyone more suitable... and I was in tears during the wedding itself... I was quite taken aback by the emotion of the whole occasion.

Once the wedding itself had happened Jim and I snuck out to take our own photo of ourselves on the cliff edge, using a remote control on my SLR.

We had specifically decided against hiring an official photographer and simply took our own cameras and handed out lots of disposable ones to our guests. This was wonderful. It meant there was no-one bossing us around or organising us. No-one intrusively taking photos - just everyone who would have been snapping away, snapping away anyway.

When I looked up from taking this shot of us I found that despite the lack of a professional photographer to organise them all the guests had got themselves together for a group shot:

We then joined them and had fun attempting to take group shots of all of us, using a camera placed a little too far away in failing light...

And the light really was fading. The wedding itself had been at 4 pm and as this was the beginning of December the sun had already officially set... (15:54). I can see the appeal of long June days now... :-)

The weather was however amazingly warm. We were incredibly lucky. And although it then proceeded to rain buckets over the next week whilst we honeymooned in Cornwall at least on the day it had been dry.

One of the advantages of handing out cameras to all the guests was the variety of choice of subjects - my favourite are these self-portraits taken by one of my sister's boys:

It was a wonderful day. I've enjoyed recalling it to share it here now. Thank you Tinker for thinking of this!

And as a final image - Jim's mother, Mary, made us this lovely memento:

Thank you for joining me on this little journey down memory lane.