“I met Jack at the age of 15 through school friends. We started meeting up for walks in the evenings and hanging out like teens do. Jack was very confident and I was extremely shy, so I’m not sure how that worked out!
One day I received a massive bouquet of flowers from him and I thought nothing more of it. There was a note telling me to meet him down the seafront in our favourite place where the views are beautiful. I was just talking about how awful boyfriend birthday cards are and the fact that they all seem to be husband cards… I turned around to a ring with Jack down on one knee and his words were ‘better take that card back then!’, which made us both laugh. Of course, I said yes!
As for wedding preparation we went on to visit a wedding fair at Westpoint Exeter and Riviera centre Torquay. I never read any wedding magazines but I used a lot of Pinterest to get ideas for décor. I bought myself a notepad to keep track of things I needed to do and buy or book. My theme was blush and pastel colours and I’ve always liked the whole vintage/ shabby chic style. To budget, each month we got paid we put some back into an account in case anything needed paying suddenly. A top tip I would give brides to be is to shop around and don’t settle for the first thing you see!
When it came to the dress I thought I wanted a dress with sleeves, something with lace. I managed to only visit one bridal shop! I picked the Ronald Joyce’s Robyn gown which is number 68060. I chose it because it has beautiful lace and covered all the areas that I wanted it to. It had lovely small details all over it. It was also the dress that made my mum and sister cry so I knew it was the one. I really enjoyed trying all the dresses on. Leanne at the shop – Abella Bridal Boutique in Plymouth, was really helpful in helping me choose the perfect dress. As the dress had a lot of lace detail at the top I didn’t need to really accessorise, the dress did it all the talking for me.
With current circumstances the wedding ended up scaled down from what we had originally envisaged, but we got married and that is the main thing. The best part for me was seeing my husband well up when he saw me coming down the aisle. He’s never cried in the whole 12 years we’ve been together, so it was a shock for me! The funniest part was Jack’s terrible speech! He’s a very confident person, but with the wedding being on a smaller scale he didn’t write a speech down and thought he would be able to wing it! I definitely recommend the groom writes a speech down - it was the shortest speech I’ve ever seen!
Photography by Sarah Jayne Photography.