True Love Tuesday: Christina & Jonny

Christina incorporated lots of personal touches to her Titanic wedding to Jonny including a tribute place setting to her late Father, a Belfast shipyard supervisor. Thanks to photographer James McGrillis Photography for sharing their day.

Christina and Jonny first met through a mutual friend, Tom at a Men’s Health Survival of the Fittest in Nottingham. “A few months later, at Tom’s birthday night out in Derby, Jonny showed up again. Luckily I remembered who he was, but later in Walkabout, I slid on the beer-sodden dance floor, and Jonny caught me – the stuff of romance! The next day he sent me a Facebook request and took things from there!” explained Christina.

The couple got engaged in November 2014 in Central Park, New York, just a few minutes after Jonny posted on Facebook ‘just off to run a ring around Central Park.’

“I was fortunate enough to have a lot of unused leave at the start of the year, which gave me five weeks to plan everything to the finest detail if I so desired. I had a good idea of what I wanted after plenty of research and soon booked our venue, the Titanic Belfast. I had to resist the urge to watch Titanic a million times and steal all my ideas from the props and costumes there! Once we’d confirmed the date, and the venue, the rest all seemed to slot into place,” explained Christina.

Christina always knew she would wear an Ian Stuart wedding gown, particularly the Cabaret gown from his 2010 collection. After lots of searching she discovered it was pretty heavy to wear all day and chose another Ian Stuart gown to wear for the evening reception. The day was given a classic colour scheme of navy, blush and ivory which perfectly complimented the nautical theme.

“My late father worked for BP in Belfast shipyard, during the late 1950s and 1960s supervising four builds – Centaur, Lancer, Vine and Statesman. Jonny works in the submarines industry, and Sunderland (Jonny’s hometown) also has a strong history of shipbuilding. Hence it made sense for there to be a nautical theme to our wedding, and leant itself well to navy being the principle colour. Everything else followed on from this: table names were either of submarines, my dad’s ships, or ships built in Sunderland or Belfast, which were broken up in Kaohsiung- where my mother is from! For the wedding favours, I wanted charities to benefit, as we’ve both ran marathons in the past for charities very close to our hearts. I had a tribute place for my father, in part to balance out the top table. He was very proud of his Chief Engineer status, so I found a merchant navy cap badge and shoulder boards on eBay and had these on display next to his photo. The fact he worked near the slipways of the Titanic meant that we could have a modern wedding, with nods to the past throughout the theme,” explained Christina.