Waiheke Island Wedding by Jo Wickham

What a nice way to start off the day... oogling over this stunning bouquet! Isn't it gorgeous? Created by Enchanted Rose Styling on Waiheke Island, it has the perfect composition in my books! Likewise the brides bouquet with it's trailing ivy. I love this type of unstructured look. Brodie & Simon got married at the gorgeous Mudbrick Vineyard and had Jo Wickham on hand to capture the day, with Sophia from My Waiheke in charge of styling. Beautiful photos Jo... thanks so much to you and the lovely couple for sharing with us!!

Waiheke Island Wedding from I do Photography

Today's gorgeous Waiheke Island wedding from Jody Lidstone of I do Photography, is actually another of my super lovely clients, and coincidentally she also had her stunning cake made by my {MAG}rouge colleague Judit... arranged way before we even began working together. Since I'm a little under the weather and having trouble forming sentences let alone typing them (fuzzy head!!), I'm going to let the gorgeous bride Caroline do the talking for me...

Gus and I met at Otago University and had been together for about 6 years when he (finally!) proposed to me on a holiday to Sydney in the middle of 2010. We wanted a reasonable amount of time to plan and wanted to get married in the summer so started planning for a wedding in the summer of 2011/2012. We were pretty relaxed about the location of our wedding (although preferred the North Island as that’s where we and most of our guests were located) so started researching wedding venues using the internet. Once we had narrowed down our possible locations, we visited a few and finally decided on Mudbrick Restaurant on Waiheke Island.

One of the highlights of the planning process was meeting all the suppliers who were so passionate about their chosen field. The most vital aspects of our wedding for us were to have as many of our most important friends and relatives present and to treat them to a lovely weekend while creating lifelong memories for ourselves. While we didn’t have a theme per se, we used the colours and design from our invitations from Ruby & Willow to tie the various aspects of our wedding together.

Our photographer and her assistant captured all the special moments of the preparations and then continued on with us to our ceremony and reception. The girls and I were treated like royalty as we were transported in stunning vintage cars10 across Waiheke Island to Mudbrick. We walked up the aisle to ‘Feeling Good’ sung by Michael Bublé towards my husband to be, the groomsmen and our amazing celebrant11. The ceremony was full of amazing words including a poem read by my sister; but the highlight was making lifelong promises to each other in front of the most important people in our lives. Many guests had travelled from outside of Auckland including my Grandma (who had just turned 90!) from Wellington and family and friends from Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia and around New Zealand.

The speeches were a highlight of the evening with Gus, his brother Ken and my father Andrew speaking words that had the audience crying one moment and laughing the next. The cake cutting was followed by our first dance to ‘How Sweet It Is’ and the dancing continued with music provided at first by our band and then later by Ken when he took over as our DJ.

Photographer | I Do Photography, Venue | Mudbrick Restaurant, Stationery | Ruby & Willow, Flowers | Blush by Kelly Amundsen, Cake | Artisan Cakes by Judit Meron, Brides Dress | Kate Dowman, Bridesmaid’s Dresses | Trish Howell,  Groom’s suit | Working Style, Groomsmen’s suits | Frank Casey, Transport | First Class Classics

* I do Photography and Blush by Kelly Amundsen are some of my fabulous sponsors.

Vibrant Summer Waiheke Island Wedding by Sutherland Kovach

This has got to be one of the most fun and vibrant New Zealand weddings I've seen... and at my favourite venue The Mudbrick on Waiheke Island!! I mean just look at that view! Sent in by the fabulous Hannah & Jasmine from Sutherland Kovach this is enough to brighten anyone's day... just look at all the details and the flowers. Annie Oxborough (from Tully & Gardener) is a master with flowers.... she also did the stunning arrangements for the baby shower I designed last year. Apologies for the image heavy post... it was a challenge to cut down!!

Haleigh and Lewis came home from chilly England to get married at Mudbrick in the middle of January. They wanted a relaxed festive atmosphere and enlisted the help of florist and stylist Annie Oxborough to deck the venue out in their chosen colours of pink and yellow. Lewis and his groomsmen wore bright yellow socks to match the bridesmaids' dresses, and all three girls carried bouquets in yellow and white. Guests were given yellow party horns to serenade the couple as they walked back down the aisle after the ceremony, which was a novel and hilarious touch!

Real Wedding: Anna + Grant II

Thanks to Joanna Wickham for sending in this gorgeous wedding, and to Anna and Grant for sharing it with us. Anna proves that you don't have to wear the dress as you bought it, with some ingenuity she transformed it into something that made it unique to her...

It was so funny – it was the very first one I tried on!! I had wanted a strapless dress but my mother was adamant that I should get one with straps and annoyingly, as always, she was right! I bought a very plain dress and then had an amazing lady do the embellishments – she took French lace and embroidered it with tiny crystals and pearls to make it really special. I was so happy with how it turned out.

We have a house on Waiheke and LOVE the island so we always knew that we would want to get married there and we also really wanted to have the reception at Cable Bay so it was very lucky that they had a date free. I guess the inspiration was the Island as we wanted the whole day to be very relaxed and outdoors and my favourite colour is pink so that was also an important inspiration!



It was great that we had so many family members there – Grant’s sisters did readings and his nieces were our flower girls. Both of our grandmothers were there too. As NZ is so far from London where a lot of my school friends are we also recently had a London wedding reception that was a lot of fun as I got to wear my dress again!



Vendors: Dress {Dessy}, Embellishments {Jacqueline Byrne}, Shoes {LK Bennett}, Bridesmaids Dresses {LK Bennett}, Venue {Cable Bay Vineyard}, Cake {Sweet Cakes}, Florist {Wild Flower}, Stationery {Letterpress of Cirencester, UK}