Sarah & Kieran’s Family Centric Wedding at Pearmund Cellars in Broad Run, VA

I feel like I say this every week, but the time just seems to be flying by! I can’t believe its almost July! We typically travel down to NC to visit Justin’s parents for the 4th, and this year has required some additional thought and deliberation as to whether or not we’ll travel. Like most everyone else, we could really use a change of scenery with a little getaway, and I’d love to take our son to the beach and to see his grandparents.

Speaking of getaways, today’s wedding feels like an escape to the European countryside. Maybe it’s the groom’s kilt, or the picturesque vineyard. I just love how many personal touches Sarah & Kieran infused into their day. If nothing else, I hope their dreamy wedding day offers an escape as we slog through another week.

Our wedding was quite small, but we wanted to make it as personal and fun as possible. Kieran and his groomsmen (his two brothers) wore their family tartan, and my bridesmaids (my two sisters) wore matching green dresses. The celebrant (a friend of the family) used a piece of the family tartan to perform a traditional hand-fasting as part of the ceremony to bring the families together. Even our dog, Huia, got to wear a tartan scarf. Not to be left out, the mothers of the bride and groom went for UK-tradition and both donned some fabulous hats to the wedding.

Our wedding venue was gorgeous enough that we didn’t need to do a whole lot for decor. We had planned to be outdoors, but after weeks of dry weather, it poured all day the day of the wedding! So we moved the ceremony inside to the barrel room, which was a beautiful space. The flower arrangements were brought inside, which added some extra color to the space.

The flowers played an important part in telling a little bit of our story. My older sister is an artist, and designed our wedding invitations with flowers representing our families coming together. Scottish thistles, for Kieran’s family, and Virginia dogwood blossoms for my family. We also found wild thistles growing near the my parents’ home, which we used to make boutonnieres for the men in the wedding. We assembled small flower vases ourselves as centre pieces for the reception, and added wild thistles to those as well.

There were lots of small, personal aspects of the wedding that made the day extra special. The guitarist played our song, Jose Gonzales’ version of “Heartbeats”, as I walked down the aisle. We have a small obsession with tea and biscuits. Nothing fancy, just good strong gumboot tea (English breakfast) and some classic British biscuits. So we had a table for these along with the catered lunch. I also baked and packaged 4 flavors of macarons in our wedding colors as favors for the guests, which somehow managed to survive a 25 hour drive to Virginia from Nova Scotia, where we currently live.

Since my family lives in America and Kieran’s family lives in New Zealand, even though we had been together for 7 years, our families had actually never met before until the week of the wedding! So there was a lot of anticipation around that. Fortunately, both of our families are a lot of fun and easy going, and everyone got along great. Having our families together all around us for our ceremony, and feeling so much love in the room was so special. We couldn’t stop smiling and laughing the entire day.

Our advice to couples is to keep it fun. The whole day is supposed to be about you. So while other friends and family may have a lot of opinions about what you should or shouldn’t do for your wedding, just keep it all personal and do what will make you (the couple!) happy! That, and order more food than you think you’ll need. Nothing wrong with leftovers.