The making of L'amour Voyage

My L'amour Voyage seaside wedding was the perfect wedding. For me and jw.

The reason why I said it was perfect wasn't because it was literally perfect. We had an inane argument the night before on how to twirl the string of leaves to decorate the staircase and ended up in cold war. We couldn't agree on which song to use for our march-in and when he suggested the song "背叛" (Betrayed) by Gary Cao to use a wedding song, I felt even more betrayed than betrayed. On the morning of our solemnization, we were still rushing to top up more BBQ food for the guests.

There is no such thing as a 100% perfect and flawless wedding because somewhere or somehow, hiccups are bound to happen. Just pray that they are minor ones.

But, looking back, I could not have a wedding any more perfect than the one I had. So in my eyes, it was indeed a dream come true and the most ideal wedding that we could ever have.

So, thanks to all the friends, photographers, relatives who helped to perfect this wedding.
 Below is a look behind the scene of L'amour Voyage.

These were the wedding invites which were handmade for the 100 guests. I had a friend who told me that when he received my invite, he could tell that I printed, cut and pasted everything myself. And because he could feel my sincerity, he said by hook or by crook he had to show up at the event. My first reaction to his words was "Huh, my cutting skills is so bad ah, you can tell so easily?", but my second and more rational reaction was "Just that one statement from you makes all my efforts worth it."

Yup. I figured out it would be more personal and sincere to design my own cards, hand write all the names and addresses on the envelopes and mail them out to each and every guest.

I was thinking, at the post office, "What if all these cards were to get lost in the mail?" I would probably faint in shock and cancel my wedding. No, of course not. I would do all the 100 cards all over again in the exact same meticulous way I did them. No, fat hope. I would just set fire to the post office. Highly likely.

My initial plan was to pick tonnes of seashells at East Coast Park to use as decorations. Alas the beach wasn't crammed with pretty seashells like I had hoped for. After two seashell picking trips, one of which when it was drizzling, I decided to go for Plan B and asked my friends to bring all the seashells, stones, pebbles they had at home. Yeah. I took the easy way out.

To make up for the failure in picking seashells, I channeled tonnes of energy into making origami instead. I made swans, cranes, hearts, stars, frogs etc and even garnered my buddies to participate in my Origami 101 session. Of course, all the origami they painstakingly folded had to go into my collection.

These were our unique wedding bands that were going to bind us as husband and wife from 26 April 2008 onwards. Ok, I admit I didn't wear them everyday after coming to Sweden. Somehow the cold winter made my fingers shrink and the ring felt loose. But if one day I were to misplace my wedding ring, you can jolly well just kill me. Before I do it myself.

Thanks to friends who were bird's nest soup lovers, I collected a good number of bottles to use as mini decorations all over the chalet. I didn't know why but I was inspired to come up with love quotes and put them on every bottle alongside a loving picture of us. Ok. I'll say it again. I'm a hopeless romantic. Not a stalker or creepy person, but just someone who is in love with love and believes in fairytales.

There! The bottles looked kinda cute after they were filled up with an assortment of rubbish, I mean, decorations, right?

No, I didn't steal all these test tubes from my chemistry lab. They were given by Regent Hotel as my customary wedding favours which I chose not to use since I was giving away CDs. Thus, I thought the test tubes would be more suitable as favours for my solemnization. I remembered tying the ribbons, writing the title, filled up the tube with glow-in-the-dark sand and the thank you note with such swift speed that I thought I might be born to be a factory worker.

Here was how the thank you note looked like in the wedding favours. Check out my jw's 6-pack in the caricature. And I had a 20" waist too.

My brilliant origami idea turned up to be quite a hassle when we were setting up the venue because they were all entangled together when we took them out. Thanks to friends who were there to help, we eventually managed to untangle them.

Guess what? My dear then fiance was reading all my captions on the wall photos for the first time. You'd better be laughing out of joy or fondness at these memories and not at how my usually-written-at-midnight captions sounded ridiculous, ok? Whatever it may be, I do hope you liked my efforts for you in doing this. We should definitely keep track of the pretty places we've been to and therefore Around the World in 80 days is an important project to me.

The reason why I wanted to jot down the dates, names of countries and all the fun little things we did there is because I'm sure they would slowly leak out from our memories as we grow old. Therefore it would definitely be good to chronicle them and remind ourselves that we had been there and done that in future. For instance, the Paris drawings above were done by jw for me when our camera was stolen after we got engaged at Eiffel Tower. Each of them was so precious to me and worth more than the hundreds of pictures we had taken. Well, almost. These are definitely memories which will bring a smile back on me whenever I look at them.

Here were my bunch of sisters and without them, the wedding would never have been so perfect. We did a sisters-only photo shoot prior to the wedding and the pictures turned out awesome. Thanks girls!

So, may there be many many more perfect weddings to come.. Not for me, but for you and everyone out there who are still single.