IT was a close call but Barrow couple Jamie Bull and Joanne Thornton were crowned the winners of the Evening Mail Win Your Wedding Competition.
The couple, who won yesterday’s public vote by 250 votes, were presented with their prize worth £1,850 at the first ever Designer Wedding Show at Abbey House Hotel in Barrow.
Mr Bull said: “It was a wonderful surprise when they announced our names as the winners as I’d seen we were second in the online vote and I really didn’t know which way it would go today.”
The couple, both 26, won prizes totalling £1,850, which include an Emporium wedding dress (£700), flowers from Eflorescence (£200), and a bridegroom’s outfit from Debenhams (£200).
It also includes photography by Powder and Paint (£750).
The pair, who met in September 2005, are getting married in a romantic ceremony at Cartmel Priory on May 23, next year. This will be followed by a lavish reception at Cartmel Racecourse. They have already booked a honeymoon in the Maldives.
Judges selected the couple as one of the three finalists after reading about Mr Bull’s romantic proposal to Miss Thornton last May, after a family day out to Piel Island, when the husband-to-be recruited the help of young son Reece Mossop, five, to help him pop the question.
Miss Thornton said: “Once we got back home Jamie took Reece upstairs to wash Reece’s sticky ice-cream hands. A few minutes later Jamie came down and said Reece wanted to see me upstairs.
“As I walked into the bathroom Reece stood there smiling, with something behind his back and said: ‘Will you marry my daddy?’ and gave me a Tiffany & Co box with a gorgeous white gold and diamond ring in it.”
The future Mr and Mrs Bull won the vote with 1,299 votes, Urswick-born Clare Turner and her fiancee Paul Shotter came second with 1,049 votes, and Walney couple Ben North and Karen Benn finished third with 380 votes.
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