Kirsty & Dan \\ DIY Comrie Croft Wedding

A relaxed, fun and colourful Comrie Croft Wedding

A blog post! finally! It is the lovely Kirsty and Dan and their Comrie Croft Wedding! If you’ve not heard of this venue or been – it is fab! A 200-year-old farmstead, house and barn set around a courtyard, together with 231 acres of fields and woods. It is a blank canvas in which you can create your own perfect wedding!

Kirsty and Dan actually live in New Zealand but wanted to have their wedding back home in Kirstys home country. So they planned almost everything from the other side of the world with the help of their friends and family in the UK. I asked Kirsty for some details from the day and this is what she had to say! Gives you a good insight into what they did while planning their wedding from New Zealand.

BRIDE/GROOM ATTIRE

“Dress from Vbridal – 275 NZD. Recommend ordering with measurements rather than a size and then getting it fitted locally. Dan’s Kilt was purchased several years ago in Currie Tartan and groomsmen’s kilts were hired from House of Henderson. The kilt hire was fairly straight forward but they did provide a few incorrect sizes that needed to be swapped.”

FLOWERS

“We made bouquets for myself and the bridesmaids in New Zealand and shipped them out. You can find lots of easy to follow patterns for fabric flowers online and we added some woven flax flowers using NZ flax. It took an absolute age to finish these (there were about 14 flowers attached to wire stems in each bridesmaids bouquet alone) but in the end we had lots of friends who helped making one or two flowers and it’s lovely to have a bouquet to keep at the end. Other flowers were just purchased from local supermarkets and arranged in jars and glasses.”

REGISTRAR

“Registrar provided by Perth Registrars, Gwenda Minto. She was excellent and gave us lots of ideas for what we wanted in the ceremony. This had been a part of the wedding we probably hadn’t given enough thought to before returning to the UK but in the end was absolutely our favourite bit.”

CAKES

“One of my bridesmaids made our wedding cakes and they were delicious. It did mean a whole day spent baking in our home before the wedding but saved a fortune.”

STATIONARY

“We designed our own Save the Dates and Invites using Canva, a free online design tool. It’s really easy to use and you can upload your own images as well as choosing from a wide selection of fonts and styles. We decided not to post our invites from NZ as the cost incurred would have been crazy and instead sent them as email attachments to our guests.

We used wedding website ‘The Knot’ to collate our RSVPs and share information with guests.”

CATERERS

We used an Edinburgh caterer, Annabelle’s Catering, for our wedding reception as I used to work for the owner and LOVE their food. They provided us with post-ceremony snacks (sausages on sticks) which we were able to add to with a massive Lidl shop of cold meats and olives.
Our main meal was in a family sharing style with a Mediterranean platter to start and tagine, couscous and salad for main.
We asked a few family members with excellent pudding skills to bring a dessert and had our own pudding table.

ANYTHING ELSE

“Our wedding venue was entirely DIY so we had to spend quite a lot of time visualising the space and working out measurements to plan tables etc. We did a lot of bulk ordering of decorations (mostly ribbons and lanterns) on amazon.co.uk and spent an entire day setting up prior to the wedding – do not underestimate how long this takes! It was actually a lot of fun but did require lots of helping hands from our fabulous family and friends.”

ANY WORDS OF WISDOM FOR ANYONE PLANNING A WEDDING FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD?!

“Enjoy it! I’m still pretty convinced that it’s easier to plan a wedding from further afield – you just can’t get too bogged down in the details. We had about a week in the UK before we got married and that was absolutely necessary to finalise the things that we couldn’t do from abroad (meet the registrar, put together table decorations and seating plans etc) but we didn’t find that wedding planning took over our lives in the lead up. Our parents were also brilliant at taking on lots of little jobs to help us out – it really was a team effort.”

There you have it! First of all, Thank you Kirsty for providing so much useful information about your awesome Comrie Croft Wedding! I enjoyed every second of the day – I was only there for a half day and provided coverage up until they sat down to dinner. Awesome venue, awesome people! Hopefully it won’t be my last Comrie Croft Wedding – one of my favourite areas of Scotland to work in and a cheeky trip to the mainland from the Hebrides is always fun!

Enough of my chat, finally, here are some photos from Kirsty and Dans perfect wedding day.