Taryn & Chase's Canadian And Scottish Wedding In Melbourne

“We wanted to share the story for those couples who happen to find themselves in the same situation, trying to plan an international wedding, incorporating two cultures in Australia.” The lovely Taryn has been so kind to share her’s and Chase’s wedding journey with us today on Polka Dot You. A blend of Canadian and Scottish wedding traditions with a touch of Melbourne.

I’m a little Glaswegian from Scotland and Chase is originally from Canada. We both met at University in sunny Glasgow, from there we got engaged on the North Coast 500 in Scotland in 2019 and decided to move to Australia for a year in 2020 (just before lockdown).

We love Melbourne so much and fast forward 3 and 1/2 years and we are now both doctors. I’m a paediatric trainee at The Royal Children’s Hospital and Chase is an emergency doctor and we have now made Melbourne our home.

Before Covid our plan had been to go back and get married at home, but as most of our friends were also on this side of the world and our life is now set up here, it just made sense to have the wedding in Melbourne.

We just wanted to share our experience as it came with some other added things when trying to organise an international wedding in Australia.

When we first started looking, we were a bit overwhelmed with what would be the right place and where. Someone suggested having a wedding planner to helping with venue finding and co-ordination on the day and that’s when we found The Nuptial Collective!

Brittany from The Nuptial Collective was so great. She chatted through our vision of combining both our heritages and knew that there would be people travelling from overseas for the wedding. So, she found us a venue within Melbourne metro so that guests wouldn’t have to travel even further.

First take on the list was finding the venue. Brittany came up with a list of venues in inner city Melbourne and arranged some site visits for us. We went to visit the State Library and the Immigration Museum (which by the way, shout out to Alice Hall) was a lovely venue, along with Siglo Bar, and Quat Quatta.

Brittany had originally suggested the Abbotsford Convent and we had said no as there wasn’t much on the website at this time as the Peter Rowland Group had just taken over. However, I went to a prosecco festival with my friends there and knew it was the one with the laid back, but stunning scenery and various rooms and options to get married.

My bridesman, Cameron and my 6 (yes 6) bridesmaids I decided to go with the general colour of green.

Each one of them from all different parts of my life are so different in their own ways. I didn’t want to limit them to a particular dress style or shade of green so I just let them choose their own that they felt comfortable in and could wear again. One of my bridesmaids wore an emerald jumpsuit that she purchased on eBay a couple of years ago (LOVE).

Cameron wore tartan trews (pants for the Australians) in his own Scottish family tartan, which just happened to match my colour scheme and had them made when he went back to visit. He told the people in the shop that he needed them to fit with enough room to slut drop and then proceeded to show them and may have ripped the initial pair he tried on.

For my maid of honour, I bought her a headband from Loeffler Randal that matched my wedding shoes. Chase had his kilt made from a kilt maker in Melbourne called Celtic Affairs kilt hire and then hired all his groomsmen’s and our brothers and dad’s kilts from there. She was wonderful.

As a present to the groomsmen, we had sgian-dubh (pronounced ski-an-do) made which is part of the traditional Scottish dress (small blunt knife) with their initials on the handle. Chase also each got them a tartan bow tie from a lovely Etsy seller.

One of my bridesmaids who sadly couldn’t make it to the wedding in the end is a doctor, but she’s also an amazing artist (I know, not fair) and she painted the Abbotsford Convent for us. We used this inspiration for our menu cards and on our website for the day. It was such a gorgeous touch and made me feel like she was with me in spirit.

We tried to be more eco-conscious by not sending out wedding invitations, so we used With Joy which is a wedding website platform where you can design your invites, send out updates, make a website for the day and send out emails. The best part is it was all free!

For styling we let the flowers do most of the talking.

We had a meeting with Asha from Pomp And Splendour about 8 months before the event. We explained our vision to her of mixing the Canadian maple leaf with the colours of the maple leaf tartan for the kilts (to include my Scottish heritage) with red, light green and dark greens.

Asha is so incredible and got very excited by the prospect and immediately came up with a gorgeous extravagant bold, bright colour palette and a selection of flowers that encompassed the fire and brightness of our relationship so well.

Pomp And Splendour also designed us an amazing ceiling install in the Abbotsford Convent on those beams. It was an absolute dream come true.

We love Etsy and we got dried maple leafs, and seaholly for the tables from Etsy as well. It worked out so beautifully. Chase and I got engaged in the Scottish Highlands and on that trip we drank Talisker Port Rouge. We bought some small bottles from Amazon and put our engagement whiskey in the bottle for the guests to enjoy as a favour.

One of our dear friends Julia, as a wedding present had postcards made with our gorgeous miniature dachshunds, Winston’s pouter that the guests could take home. I’ve already had one sent back to me as a birthday card. People had travelled from all over for our wedding which we were so grateful for and so we decided on a no wedding registry policy and instead asked guests if they wanted to, to send a donation Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders which is an amazing organisation.

Now for the person we both are most happy we hired, our celebrant Damon Hughes. I don’t have enough words to describe how amazing he made our day. Our guests have raved about him since our wedding. We met him a couple of times before and he really took the time to get to know us and our story. He asked us some difficult but important questions such as “why are you getting married?” He also asked us to fill out some questions about each other that were kept private until the big day and revealed as a surprise during the ceremony which was hilarious.

One of my favourite little touches of the day was our petals that our flower Mum’s threw down the aisle.

Our gorgeous family friend, who is like a second mum to us, sent us rose petals from her garden in Suffolk that she dried, and it just made it so special.

Chase has a really good way with words and told my friends that he had been writing his vows since the day we met. Naturally, I completely panicked at that, and Damon offered to look over mine for me and gave me a structure to follow that worked out well.

He took the time to really design our ceremony for us. I even gave him the task of incorporating hand-fasting which is a traditional Celtic tradition where members of the family, guests or wedding party lay down a rope and you physically “tie the knot.”

Damon went away and researched this and came back with some different ideas of how we could incorporate this. In the end we allocated members of our bridal party to pick a colour that most defined our relationship to them, and they laid them over both of our hands.

Chase’s brother Jake surprised us on the day with a beautiful poem that matched his colour and described our relationship. We were both in tears.

We are most proud that Damon was able to pronounce Chase’s last name “Schultz-Swarthfigure” and he made our ceremony so warm, funny and entertaining for everyone. It was out of this world (again recommended by the amazing Brittany).

For the reception, we opted for the Rosina room and rose garden for after ceremony cocktails. Most of our overseas guests had taken the week off to make the most of coming to Australia which meant that we were able to get married on a weekday.

The Peter Rowland group threw in some free cocktails for us for this reason along with some other perks. We had long wooden trestle tables and the venue gave us the options of a few different napkins. They also have the option of sharing platters which I thought was a lovely idea and the food was incredible. Not your average chicken dinner, with loads of vegetarian and vegan options.

They also have the option of round tables if you want this and have outdoor furniture in the Rosina courtyard that guests can use to sit on. We decided to have our ceremony in the courtyard and the Peter Rowland group sourced chairs that they let us use free of charge. It was also a 35-degree hot day on the day we got married and they sourced us some umbrellas to use.

Now these little touches made our day even more special. Something we will always remember is our guests and the little surprises they made to us on the day.

Having a wedding away from home often means that people can’t come, but this doesn’t mean they can’t be there supporting you. We decided to have our day live streamed which was one of the best decisions we made. I was shocked at how clear the quality of the live stream was. It meant that our friends and family from home could set up a party 12 hours after to watch our wedding as it was available to watch 14 days after the wedding.

I was then able to download all footage afterwards and keep watching forever.

Another thing that kept our loved ones that couldn’t attend close to our heart, was what our bridal party did. They collected small funny stories from family and some of my bridesmaids that couldn’t come and read it to us during the reception. It was perfect.

For our entertainment, we knew it wouldn’t be a Scottish wedding without pure Scottish dancing and music.

Chase and I both love ceilidh dancing (Scottish dancing pronounced kay-lee), so we went to the Melbourne tartan festival ceilidh dancing and was able to source our amazing band Cathy And Catie Strings. They also helped us to find our amazing bagpiper Josh Chandler. We spoke a few times over the phone, and I gave him a list of songs that I wanted for walking down the aisle and for playing when I arrived, and he was so flexible for making sure he knew what I wanted.

Our DJ was DJ Patrick Bialek, I gave him a Spotify playlist of pure Abba and even some traditional Scottish music that he mixed for us later in the evening and played throughout our reception.

We also can’t not mention our choreographed first dance. Chase and I set the Secret Garden of Dance in Melbourne, the challenge of a medley. We chose three songs as a mash up. “You’ve Got The Love” by Florence & The Machine, “Volare” by Gypsy Kings and to finish, “I’ve Had The Time Of My Life” by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes.

Our day was captured by the team at Iconic Pictures and Wild Romantic Photography and they were so brilliant on the day and took natural shots that made me feel at ease.