I wonder how lovely it must be to spend your working life creating things from your imagination, then have the opportunity to pour all that creativity into something as personal as your own wedding.
Mikayla and Tessa are both artists who work in theatre. Mikayla designs and makes puppets and Tessa is a scenic artist, and when they married at The Ecology Pavilion in East London’s Mile End Park on 13th August 2026, they brought their vision of a colourful world inspired by vintage magic shows to life.
Velvet tablecloths, paper chains, brightly coloured stars, lovingly handmade decorations and a room full of people who had travelled from the Philippines, Scotland and beyond to celebrate with them. Their photographer was the incredibly lovely and exceptionally talented analogue film wedding photographer, Bobby Tsang, one of our recommended suppliers. Enjoy!
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The Venue & Location
Our wedding ceremony and reception were held at The Ecology Pavilion, Mile End Park. We chose a London venue because of the accessibility to all our friends and family from around the world. We also loved being in a green space even though we were in the middle of the city.
Enough space to hold a ceilidh was a big factor, and we knew it was likely to be hot, so air con was a necessity.
The Fashion
Mikayla wore a dress from John Lewis and a wedding cape designed and made by Martin Bautista and I wore a dress from Azazie with shoes from adidas.
Azazie had a pop up event in London, so I was able to try on a few different dresses and realised how hot and heavy a lot of wedding dresses are! For both weddings, I ended up choosing non-wedding dresses that happened to come in white, which meant I was able to survive the hot weather, and dance and be on my feet all evening.
Mikayla’s matron-of-honour, Lia Uy, and her godmother, Dada Uy, made her special hair clips, and she wore Gucci Flora.
Mikayla gave me a beautiful necklace with stars on, which I wore for both weddings. Stars were a symbol we used a lot in our wedding design, from the graphic design we did for our invites to the decorations on the day, so it was perfect!
Mikayla also wore a reception cape designed and made by nau nau, and shoes from Maison Margiela.
We were in the hands of our friend Jacob Bottomley, who brought all our hair and make-up ideas together beautifully. He was the most calming presence to have with us as we got ready in our hotel room, and our hair and make-up miraculously didn’t budge all day, even when it was about 37°C!
The Ceremony
We were driven to the wedding by my dad, Mark, in the van we hired to bring our wedding decorations to the venue from our studio! He decorated the inside to make it more festive.
The music for our processional was an instrumental piano version of Mika’s Tiny Love, arranged by our close friend Rony Fortich. My mum, Lee, also did a reading of the lyrics during our legal ceremony on Tuesday. The song is special to us so both of these moments were very emotional!
Our celebrant was Luis Yatco, our flatmate and close friend. We got legally married on the Tuesday before with a small number of our immediate family and friends, so that when we declared our love on Thursday in front of everyone it was completely on our own terms and to our own script.
We cried a lot during the ceremony so it helped to have some light and funny moments mixed in!
We included a cord ceremony wherein our godparents placed a cord over us to symbolise everlasting love.
We tailored our own vows based around meaningful moments and experiences we’ve shared over the years.
Three of our friends gave readings of different songs, including a reading of “You’re Still the One” by Shania Twain. We cried a lot during the ceremony so it helped to have some light and funny moments mixed in!
Our rings were made by Ste of Wooden Gold, who we met a few years ago when we were working in the same studios, and are made of heirloom metal from both sides of the family.
Mikayla’s ring is a white-gold ring with her grandmother’s diamond on it, while mine is a yellow-gold ring made from my great-grandmother’s wedding ring. The rings were sand cast with sand mixed together from beaches in the Philippines and Scotland, where Mikayla and I are from, respectively.
Our photographer was Bobby Tsang. We were very drawn to his style of photography and how his work feels natural and lived-in.
We wanted our wedding to feel as natural as possible (since we both don’t love posing in front of a camera) and we knew Bobby’s work would be perfect for the day, plus we loved his use of film.
We truly could not recommend Bobby more. He captured the day so beautifully and made us feel so comfortable throughout the celebration.
How They Met
We met when we were both doing our masters at the Royal College of Music and Drama where we were studying Design for Performance. We had been engaged for a year and a half before the wedding and started planning small things almost immediately
We are from two different countries, so most of our family and friends travelled in order to make it to the wedding. It felt so meaningful that people were willing to travel so far for us, and seeing everyone together, from our oldest to our newest friends and everyone in between, made us feel so much joy and gratitude.
There was such a palpable sense of love in the room – we might just have the kindest, warmest, and most generous friends and family imaginable.
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In the lead-up to the wedding, we truly couldn’t believe how many people were willing to help with the preparations and how generous everyone was with their time, from coming to our studio to make the decorations, to running all over london picking up different things for us, to being at the venue the night before to help set everything up, to solving various small crises that came up on the day before we even realised there were small crises coming up.
There was so much brainpower, energy, and creativity channelled into making the wedding happen, and we felt beyond lucky.
The Reception
We both work in theatre so we wanted our inspiration to reflect that. We called the theme of our Pinterest board ‘vintage magic show’ because we love the warmth that the style and motif evoked and the colours that surrounded it.
We wanted the wedding to be fun and colourful, and tried to add a lot of different textures and shapes to the space, from velvet tablecloths to paper chains to foil stars.
Since we work in theatre making props, puppets, and scenery, we organised all the decor ourselves and made a lot of things by hand. The wedding arch was made and painted by us and our bridesmaids and hung by friends who helped us set up the venue.
Our flower girl and talented production designer, Irene Kim, did all of the styling, somehow turning our pile of table cloths, array of paper stars, and mish-mash collection of colourful vases and bottles into the most beautiful and elegant dressing.
The stars around the venue were brought to the UK from the Philippines in various bridesmaids’ suitcases and sprayed bright colours by our friends. A group of our friends and family diligently put together hundreds of metres of paper chain in the days leading up to the wedding.
The heart photobooth, which was shamelessly copied from Pinterest, was built in our studio and dressed in the venue the night before. Even the wooden fans we gave our guests each had a colourful tassel attached by hand, courtesy of Kayla’s mum, Leia!
Our flower girl Irene Kim, was also our floral designer! She chose all the types of flowers based on our favourites and, along with our bridesmaid Ross Du and my dad Mark, went to the wholesale flower market at 6am on the day of the wedding to buy everything.
The bottles were donated to us from different restaurants and the vases were sourced from different online retailers. Irene filled the tables with beautiful flower arrangements and Ross made the bridal bouquets while Mikayla’s mother, Leia, made the entourage bouquets and boutonnières.
Our caterers were D’Cocina, a Filipino catering company, as Mikayla wanted to share her culture through food.
We bought our cake from Costco and our friends decorated it with raspberries and strawberries from our local Tesco. One of our bridesmaids, Ross Du, illustrated the cake topper.
As for special roles within our wedding party, our flower girl, Camila, became a bartender of sorts, serving everyone some Mongolian Vodka she brought straight from Ulaanbaatar.
We designed our save the dates, RSVP website, and wedding ‘playbill’ to match our theme. The playbill we gave to our guests had a ‘cast list’ of our entourage and a kayla-and-tess-themed crossword constructed by our friend, Gabi Garcia. The first thing we designed was a logo with two stars holding hands, and it came with us all the way from the save the dates to the wedding day itself.
We gave our guests fans engraved with our names and the date, which turned out to be a good shout as our wedding happened to land on the hottest day of the year.
We hired the Cumberland Ceilidh Band, as I wanted to share my culture through dance.
For our first dance, the band played Cali’s Wedding by Hanneke Cassel. It’s a tune I find so beautiful, and ever since I first heard it about 15 years ago I imagined it being part of my wedding.
It was also immensely fun to see different combinations of friends get to know each other and eat, drink and ceilidh dance together.
Favourite Moments
Words of Wedded Wisdom
Weddings are for you and to celebrate your love. Even though there is a lot of pressure around planning a wedding and though emotions may run high, it’s important to remember that it’s a day of celebration.
It’s also a day you should be able to enjoy – if there is any part of the traditional structure of a wedding that you don’t like or that doesn’t serve you, then take it out! There are no rules, so pick and choose the parts that you want!
Lastly, the day itself will happen so fast and be over before you know it, so make sure you savour every moment!
In hindsight, we should have stopped working way before the wedding itself! We were working up until the day before the wedding, and in the last few days before the wedding it pretty much became its own full-time job, which was hard to balance with, well, a full-time job!
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