Lucy & Pat’s French Picnic Style Wedding

Lucy & Pat

Lucy and Pat chose the incredible sandstone building of the NSW Writers Centre as the backdrop for their French Picnic style wedding. After the ceremony in the gardens, guests feasted on a spectacular grazing table under the setting sun before dancing the night away! Weeligoh Photography captured all the joy and romance of the day.

“We actually met on our first day of high school, and were really good friends the whole way through school. But it wasn’t until our last day of year 12, when he realised we wouldn’t be seeing each other every day that Pat took the plunge and asked me out. And we ended up getting married exactly 7 years from that day!”

Lucy chose a gown by Felicitas Bridal and paired it with pale blue ballet flats from Witchery. She remembers, “I had a full tulle dress with a layer of sparkly tulle peeking through, so I shimmered in the sunlight. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, and certainly got a lot of compliments on the day!”

On choosing the NSW Writers Centre  as their wedding venue, Pat tells, “It was really important to us that our guests had no lag time between the ceremony and reception, so we decided to use the same venue for both. As soon as we walked through the stone doorway into the grounds of the NSW Writers’ Centre in Rozelle it felt like a secret garden, and we knew immediately that this was where we wanted to get married.”  Lucy adding, “It was also great to have access to both the grounds and the Centre itself, so we had an inbuilt wet-weather plan!”

For her walk down the aisle, Lucy chose, “Welcome Home by Radical Face. It’s just a beautiful song that gives us shivers every time we listen to it.”

Jessykah Miles at Milestone & Co performed the marriage ceremony. Lucy notes, “We loved our amazing vendors! They really worked so hard to listen to us, and what we wanted, and to turn that into a reality. We could never have done it without them!”

Pat tells one of the funnier memories of the day. “As we were rejoining the crowd after signing the marriage certificate, Lucy suddenly looked at me, terrified, and started whacking me with her flowers. It turned out that I had a spider crawling up my shirt, so she wasn’t just hitting me for no apparent reason!” Lucy explaining, “For some reason my dress was some kind of haven for insects, so there are a lot of photos of me and an army of helpers rifling through the 13 layers of tulle picking out sneaky flies!”

Lucy remembers, “One of my bridesmaids even flew out from NZ a week before the wedding to be our full-time extra pair of hands, calmer-downer, and cook!”

Of their photographer, Lucy remembers, “I’d been secretly reading Polka Dot Bride for a few months before we got engaged, and so as soon as we were engaged I knew where to look for our vendors! A few months later you featured an engagement shoot Weeli had done, and it was love at first sight! His photos were full of colour and light and smiles, and that was exactly what we wanted. Pat: He was so brilliant to work with, we couldn’t have asked for anyone better. He came up with great ideas, but made sure that we were always in charge and comfortable with every photo. On the day, it felt like having another friend there (who happened to have a camera, and take amazing photos!), and true to his word, he stayed right until the last person left the dance floor. We can’t recommend him highly enough!”

The bouquets and bridal party flowers were arranged by Gemma Mehta (0452447462), the bride noting “The flowers were a pretty amazing feature. They were the only decoration we had, so after two 4:30am trips to the flower market our house was bursting with beautiful poppies and ranunculus that we arranged in jars that we’d had everyone we knew collecting for the past year! They really brought colour and life to the day.”

“We had giant pick up sticks and giant jenga for the (big) kids, and a photobooth with photos of our grandparents on their wedding days as the backdrop.”

Lucy remembers, “It was really important to both of us for the whole wedding to be true to us, so there were personal touches everywhere. My mum is a stylist, so she had a hand in just about every aspect of the day, and was really able to bring all of my muddled ideas into beautiful reality. We were going for a vintage French picnic kind of vibe, so had picnic blankets, and a spectacular grazing table put together by the amazing Violets and Vinegar team.”

Lucy tells “We made our own photobooth, did a lot of the flower buying/arranging ourselves, made the favours, and really the biggest job was coordinating the whole thing. Because we booked a venue that doesn’t offer package deals, we had to source and coordinate all of our own vendors – a tricky task, but one that I think was the key to the day being as perfect as it was.”

Pat remembers, “It really did take a village to pull the day off, and none of it would have been possible if we didn’t have all those people helping us make it all happen.”

Lucy loved, “Having so many of our friends and family involved in so many different aspects of the planning and setup. That really meant the world to us. Being able to look around and see everyone we love with us (and for once not needing to check my phone every 5 minutes, because everyone important was already there!”

Of their first dance, Lucy remembers, “We were pretty adamant not to have a traditional ‘first dance’, because we’re not very traditional, and neither was our wedding. So I think our first dance ended up being to Pharrell Williams’ ‘Happy’ with some very enthusiastic family members!” Pat adding “I think my uncle actually had the first dance!”

Congratulations on your marriage Lucy and Pat! Thank you for sharing your day with us! Thank you also to Weeligoh Photography for sharing today’s glorious wedding!