Nicole & Glenn’s weekend wedding-type thingy with a wombat

We gave you a little preview of this uber cool wedding in one of the monday montages. Best rear-view of a dress EVAR ring any bells? Here's more! You can thank me later. -Coco

The offbeat bride: Nicole, graduate architect (and OBT Member)

Her offbeat partner: Glenn, graduate architect and sometime guitarist, song-writer, novelist

Location & date of wedding: Boyd Education Centre, Riversdale, NSW, Australia — February 27, 2010

What made our wedding offbeat: Definitely the wombats. We had been living overseas for five years and wanted to get married in Australia with some bushland, some water and preferably some wombats. We managed all three; the wombat who showed up late in the evening to see what all the noise was about was a big hit.

Glenn wrote the whole ceremony and later had everyone in stitches with his comic love song performance in place of a speech. Our first dance was everyone dancing, except us. We had nine delicious cakes and a number of friends who tried a piece of each and every one of them. The guests all stayed overnight so we danced until the wee hours and dabbled with skinny-dipping and wombat-chasing. We had breakfast together the next morning and a day at the beach eating the leftover cake and cheese.

I made pretty much everything I could myself, drawing on many of the great ideas on OBT. The bouquets, buttonholes and decorations were concocted from wrist watch parts, feathers, beads, old maps of London, miniature plastic bicycles, sticks and other bits and pieces. A family team helped out with the crepe paper flowers. Glenn and I designed all the stationery and ink-stamped parts of the design with rubber stamps we had made for us. My lovely Mum made the cake-stands out of old plates and vases and all the tin and tea-cup candles.

Tell us about the ceremony: The ceremony was all ours: written from scratch by Glenn with plenty of humour and the occasional serious moment thrown in, all read beautifully by our celebrant.

The ceremony began with a brief look at worldwide marriage traditions (“…and in parts of Germany, after the future couple has swept up a mass of broken plates using a toothbrush and the kidnapped bride has been ransomed by the groom from a nearby pub, the newlyweds saw through a log together, symbolising the co-operation required for a successful marriage and to affirm the oft repeated adage that being a lumberjack is OK.”) and continued with: “So why would two people with no known history of significant mental health problems still choose to marry?” Before going on to answer that question. It suited us perfectly and reading it again still makes me cry and/or laugh.

Our biggest challenge: Organising a wedding from the other side of the world and working out how to post back all the hundreds of paper flowers I'd made. Ikea would have been proud of my flat-packing! We managed to organise everything through lots of emails, help from my Mum on the ground and quite a few one am (our time) phone calls to vendors. Having a couple of weeks between arriving in Australia and the wedding to finalise it all also really helped.

In the end, it actually helped us relax about some of the planning; we had to go and do some strange certified form-signing at the embassy in London, we hadn't tasted the cakes or food before-hand and I didn't see one of the bridesmaids dresses until she put it on on the day, but everything came together and we certainly had our happy ending. Oh, and as we wanted to buy Australian wine we did have to fit our trial tastings of three different reds, three whites and three sparkling wines into a couple of days. I'm a bit hazy on that period.

My favorite moment: Seeing our wonderful friends and family gathered in one place from all around the world and knowing they'd thought it worth the effort to be there, brought home how important a step it was for us to commit to each other in marriage.

My funniest moment: If you look at the photos and see our guests are crying with laughter, this was the point at which Glenn performed his “Teenage Mutant Ninja Love Song,” which including such verses as:

Love is all around; it's in the air
It's underground
And it can be yours if you've got 20 pounds
A little like this song.

A couple of my aunts have put together a video; available for the bargain price of £20…

My advice for offbeat brides: Check out Offbeat Bride. Oh, you must have already done that. Actually, I have been saying that to all my friends who are planning weddings at the moment. I've also advised them that it's great to do the paper flower thing, but be prepared for it to take many, many hours. On the plus side, anyone taking this path will be left with a thorough knowledge of every art shop, craft shop, discount shop and online shop selling paper in their city, which may come in handy for something later. Possibly. Nonetheless, I was very happy with how all the things I made turned out and making them was probably my favourite part of the wedding planning.

Care to share a few vendor/shopping links?

• Venue: Boyd Education Centre, Riversdale, NSW.
• Catering: River Deli, Nowra.
• Cakes: Paris Cakes, Sydney and The Cake Shop, Nowra.
• Frock: Culture Bridal Couture, Sydney.
• Suit: Start, London.
• Hair do-da: Etsy – Portobello
• Celebrant: Dallas McMaugh.
• Hair: Visionary Hair.
• Makeup: Ethix.
• Photographer: RWP Creative Photography.

Enough talk — show me the wedding inspo!

About the Author: Offbeat Weditors

@offbeatbride @offbeatwed

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