This festival wedding is totally awesome! Amy and Chris certainly know how to style a wedding and throw a party, and boy I wish I was there!
Everything about this wedding is pretty darn cool. To start with, Amy and Chris named their wedding 'Lonkerfest', which is a combination of their surnames with a festival twist. They even had their own logo designed, which they used on their wedding stationery.
This wedding is bold and flamboyant and features plastic flamingos, funky sunglasses, blow up cacti, pom poms, loads of balloons, personalised cake toppers and funny pictures of all their guests.
Amy's fabulous tea length wedding dress was custom made from a second hand full length dress with train. This is just a small symbol of how much effort and customisation these guys put into their big day.
When you see the pictures of this amazing 'Lonkerfest' wedding, taken by Howelljones Photography, you will see by the huge grins that are on everyone's faces just how much fun they all had. You guys rock!
"We met through mutual friends in Perth, Australia. Chris was there backpacking from the UK and I grew up in Sydney. He met our mutual friends at a camp ground in Darwin, and when I went over to Perth to visit my friends (I lived in Sydney at the time) I met Chris at one of their parties. We did long distance between Perth and Sydney for seven months (no mean feat – it's a five hour flight!) before we decided to move to London together. That was eight years ago.
"We chose Colehayes Park as our venue, and I can't say enough good things about this place. They're one of the only totally DIY wedding venues in the country – you can literally do whatever you want which is exactly what we wanted. We had zero restrictions from decorations to time we finished. They are so incredibly helpful, friendly, lovely and great to deal with.
"We went for a bit of a festival wedding theme and called our wedding 'Lonkerfest' (my surname is Lonnen and his is Straker – together we're Lonkers!). We were staying at Colehayes Park for a full week with loads of fun activities, dancing and partying throughout the week, and happened to be getting married in the middle of it.
"As per our invitations we went for loads of colour with our wedding styling. From the multicoloured chairs and balloons for the ceremony, to the colourful bunting with pictures on it collated from the eight years we've been together. We collected bottles from local pubs to put our flowers in for the dining room tables and bar, which looked brilliant. We even had a flamboyance (the collective term!) of plastic flamingos stalking across the grounds!
"We thought long and hard about our first dance song, thinking about the kind of music we usually dance together to. We didn't want to have a soppy, emotional, slow song as we never dance to that kind of thing, so we thought about the kind of music we love. In the end we went with a dance track from the 90s called 'Set You Free' by NTrance. The lyrics are actually bang on in sentiment, and we ended up having a first dance rave with all our guests. It was a perfect tribute to the week of partying we'd had and set the tone for the rest of the night.
"Other than marrying the love of my life, the most lovely thing was all my different groups of family and friends coming together and seeing them all having so much fun together!
"All our suppliers were such warm, lovely people who genuinely cared about how our day went, which made a huge difference. Our photographer was a huge win. He took such incredible, beautiful pictures and everyone at the wedding loved him!