A year ago today we were married in a way so perfect & true to us- by the side of a remote Scottish loch, just us, our Humanist celebrant, the estate gardener & the local chef! We even took our own wedding photos, & video to play at our exceptionally quirky Brighton wedding reception a couple of weeks later! It was so wonderful watching the reactions of our family & friends- laughter & tears, all of which we would have missed had we been at the front worrying about getting our lines right!

We wanted to be married somewhere beautiful, dramatic and remote – somewhere that was just ours! We hadn’t visited Kingairloch beforehand, so we spent our first day at the cottage exploring its stunning surroundings, & found the perfect little spot for our ceremony- an old tree right on the water’s edge. We had made hordes of reclaimed fabric fairy light garlands for the reception & brought one with us just in case we found a use for it… & we did!

Be imaginative when finding places to look for your wedding dress – bridal boutiques are not the be all and end all. I wanted something that was mine, a one off, designed for just me! I was gathering inspiration on Etsy & toying with the idea of designing my own, when I came across Armour sans Anguish who uses reclaimed fabric (girl after my own heart) to create one-of-a-kind garments to order, at a fraction of the price of a ‘traditional’ wedding dress.

I wanted to make my own bridal bouquet, one that I could keep and admire from time to time! Initially it was going to be made up of paper &/or fabric flowers, but it grew as time went on! We spotted some cotton stems at a flower stand & grabbed a bunch, then at Belles Bridal Boot Fair, my magpie eyes fell on some crystal flowers- perfect to add a little sparkle to an otherwise rather rustic looking bouquet!

Each glass of bubbly had a different brightly coloured edible flower in it- hand selected & picked on our behalf by the super-lovely Freedom Flowers. This was a pretty & cost-effective way of jazzing up the arrival drinks & set the tone for the reception- fun & memorably quirky!


What will set the tone at your wedding?

Sod the traditional 3 course meal… we served coffee with a selection of scrummy Marwood cakes, like chili&plum & blueberry&lavender, followed later by a fish&chip supper served in paper, from a local chippy. After the video the most incredible chocolate brownies EVER were handed out fresh from the oven! It would usually be around this time that the wedding cake would be cut and served, so instead, we put pieces of our bespoke Choccywoccydoodah cake in party bags.

We just can’t resist a good rummage around a boot fair or charity shop! Leave yourself plenty of time if you plan to collect treasures for your wedding- we spent the best part of a year gathering tea & coffee sets, in a variety of patterns, colours and eras to match our colourful, eclectic theme! We used the tea and coffee pots as vases for centrepieces and scattered the rest of the crockery on tables surrounded by paper butterflies! It really worked!

We pegged little ‘wishes’ on ribbons tied to embroidery hoops & hung from the ceiling. On one side they read ‘It is usually customary for the guests to grant wishes for the bride&groom – we are turning that on it’s head! Pick a wish & keep it safe’, & the other had little wishes such as ‘find a pot of gold’, ‘find someone who makes your toes curl’ & ‘be visited by the stork’!

We gathered fabric from charity shops and ‘worn and washed’ fabric from Liberty & headed over to my mum’s to set up a little production line! Within a few minutes, my mum had designed a handful of coffee filter flowers, having completely disregarded all the paper & fabric flower tutorials we had found online, & we just loved them! So we set about making another 250 odd for our reception, each one unique, & picked out a few favourites for my bouquet.

Your wedding venue doesn’t have to be a ‘wedding venue’. If they don’t often/ever hold weddings, they’ll have no preconceived ideas about what a wedding ‘should’ look like or how the day ‘should’ pan out, so the world’s your oyster! We were at The Marwood one afternoon having coffee (& ‘life changing’ cake) & it hit us that it would be an awesome venue! So we just walked up to the bar & asked on the off-chance if they would consider hiring it out for a wedding! They were open to ALL our ideas & bent over backwards to accommodate them, helping us to achieve the ‘memorably quirky’ wedding reception we had hoped for!

(Marwood reception photos by Eliza Claire)