Orla and Colin's Travel Themed Castle Dargan Wedding

Having already featured Orla and Colin’s engagement shoot and engagement party, we practically feel like family at this stage, so it was only right that we should have a wee peek at the wedding itself!

For those of you who haven’t been keeping up, Colin and Orla met in 2009 while working in the Head Office of Brown Thomas in Dublin. Colin moved to Sydney later that year and Orla moved to London, but she missed him so much that she packed up her life in a backpack and followed him to Sydney a year later. As it turned out, a proposal on the balcony was just around the corner. Orla explains:

“One Friday evening in January we were having dinner on our balcony looking out over the beach when Colin got down on one knee and proposed with a beautiful diamond ring. He had planned on waiting until our holiday in Fiji but the ring was burning a hole in his pocket!”

The couple decided that they wanted to return home to Ireland to get married, so they undertook the massive task of planning their wedding from the other side of the world. However, they enlisted plenty of help from family and friends, and quickly decided on a ‘travel’ theme.

“My Mum and Dad went to a few wedding fairs and at one of these in Roscommon they met our photographer Brian Duignan who is based in Carrick-on-Shannon. We loved the gallery on his website and when we met him a few days before the wedding we knew we had made the right choice as we really clicked with him and he made us really relaxed from the start. We are delighted with all the photos and he really captured all the special moments. “

“I bought my wedding dress before we had even booked a venue. It was only the third one I ever tried on. I was in the designer Henry Roth’s Sydney studio and I loved it at first sight. I knew it was the one. I actually saw it on another bride-to-be as she was trying it on and, as it was a one off piece, I was gutted to miss out on it. However, my quick thinking and nimble fingered friend Geraldine nabbed it for me when the other lady was trying on another dress! It fitted like a glove and when I saw tears in Geraldine’s eyes that sealed the deal for me so I quickly paid for it while I still had it on!”

Ohh, controversial, Geraldine!

“As we were coming from Sydney and so many guests were travelling to our wedding from abroad, we themed the wedding around travel. Each table was named after a place we had visited or lived in. The cake, which a family friend made and beautifully iced for us, was a set of suitcases topped with customised bobble head cake toppers. The presents for the groomsmen were cufflinks personalised with maps of where they are from and I got the bridesmaids beautiful personalised bespoke bracelets from PK Originals which included maps of their home county. “

“We couldn’t decide on just one colour for the bridesmaids, so using our retail experience and contacts we designed the marble print of the bridesmaid dresses ourselves and sent it to China to get it printed on silk. They shipped the finished fabric to us in Sydney and I then worked with a local dressmaker in Sydney to design the dresses, using my sister and chief bridesmaid as the mannequin. I then had to ship them off to each of the other bridesmaids in New York, London and Dublin for some minor alterations.”

“We really wanted to do as much as we could ourselves so our wedding was very DIY. We made all the stationery, the mass booklets, the seating plan, name cards, the favours and a lot of the decorations. Two of our groomsmen are carpenters and made the wonderful wooden signpost. My Dad made all the name card holders out of corks. We paid a lot of attention to the little details and we were really happy with the end result. “