Your East Anglian Wedding - Aug/Sep 2019 (Issue 38)

My bridesmaids wore maxi dresses to go with our dusky rose colour scheme and carried simple bunches of gypsophila. As I’m quite short I had my dress made. I knew I wanted a cross between a mermaid and a sheath design to show off my curves! The wedding flowers had a natural rustic feel using British blooms with a pop of blue and beautiful green foliage. We laid on a double-decker bus and coach to get our guests from the church to the reception and provided them with a gin and tonic and a packet of Hula Hoops each for the journey. L ei and Chris were together for nearly eight years before Chris proposed. “We were friends and then housemates before becoming a couple so we never really went through the whole first-date thing as we were already living together,” Lei explains. “He ended up moving to Australia with me, so I could be closer to my immediate family and, for me, that was such a huge commitment, it was pretty much like a marriage!” On the last night of a trip to Cairns in Queensland, Chris popped the question with the ring, music, champagne and dinner for two all on cue. “We were in our hotel room getting ready to go out when he surprised me with a lovely silver necklace. As he put it around my neck, a Brian McKnight song suddenly started playing (he’d sneaked one of our Bluetooth speakers into the room) and when I looked in the mirror the ring was on the chain. The next thing I knew, he was down on one knee asking me to marry him. The answer was always going to be ‘yes’,” Lei reveals. Right on schedule, room service arrived with champagne and strawberries, before the taxi pulled up to whisk them off for a romantic meal. “We knew we wanted a British wedding as we’re both born and raised in the UK. We decided on Norfolk as it’s where we first met and we love it there. We live in Brisbane so our friends Tim and Pippa checked out venues for us and after viewing The Barn at Woodlands they FaceTimed us and Pippa was bouncing up and down in her chair with excitement,” adds Lei. Read on for her account of their big day... 48