Girl Tweets World travel blogger, Jayne Gorman married her adoring fiancé, Justin in a beautiful beach ceremony in Khao Lak, Thailand.
Their day was so magically captured by Phuket wedding photographer, Darin Images, and features stunning sunset shots, Jayne wearing an amazing floral wedding dress, and a magnificent lantern finale…
Words by Jayne. Images by Darin Images.
As I’m English and Justin is Australian choosing a location where most of our friends and family could get to was really difficult. We considered almost every country in between the UK and Oz and eventually centred our search on Thailand as we were both familiar with the region and had got engaged there in 2015.
Once we settled on Thailand I then began looking for family-friendly but luxury resorts that were accessible by road as some family members don’t like boats! At around this time I received a press release from The Sarojin and thought the hotel looked divine.
We looked into a family-friendly resort in nearby Khao Lak for our guests to stay at (as The Sarojin is adults only) and then locked in the date with The Sarojin. In the end, no children attended but we wanted to make sure they weren’t excluded from our plans at the start.
My wedding dress wasn’t my first choice! I had initially gone with a full skirted ivory gown by Wendy Makin but there were problems during the alterations process and I was really disappointed with the final result. The dress was ordered in very large and even after 5 rounds of alterations the cups were too big, the bodice was creased from multiple stitches and I felt frumpy in it – far from what a bride dreams of.
The week before the wedding I made the risky decision of sourcing another dress. I remembered trying on this beautiful floral gown by Jennifer Gifford so I rang her to see if the sample (which was my size) was still in stock. Luckily it was so I flew to Brisbane the next day to collect it and have no regrets whatsoever about the change!
We worked with an Australian based company called Wedding Destinations who coordinated with the venue on our behalf and sourced trusted suppliers like the DJ and Make-Up Artist.
My brother walked me down the aisle to ‘Halo’ by Beyonce.
Justin and I are a social media love story! We met via my travel blog and he first asked me out over Twitter. After 4 years travelling the world and moving to Australia together, Justin asked me to marry him on my 30th birthday in Thailand. You can read our story here.
As a slightly fussy travel blogger, I had a particular style in mind for our wedding photography. I searched countless blogs to find a Thai based photographer I loved and at one stage was thinking I might have to fly someone in from Australia.
Eventually, I stumbled across Darin Images and immediately loved her romantic style. Darin was based in Phuket so we just had to cover her travel expenses to Khao Lak. We skyped in advance and then met the day before the wedding to go over how we could help her get the best images on the day.
Herself and her assistant were then with us for 12 hours on the day to capture all the candid, champagne-filled moments as well as our couple portraits which came out better than we ever imagined. Darin was absolutely delightful to work with and blew us away with the quality of her photography.
I looked at a lot of blog posts about Thai weddings to get a good idea of what would work well in the setting. We wanted to keep things simple enough to let the location do the talking but personalised enough that it represented us. We added elements of gold as I love a bit of bling but kept everything else as neutral as possible.
I was also guided by our photographer’s style and took note of things she photographed for other brides – like the accessories and getting ready process – and made sure we had pieces that would picture well.
Our flowers were provided by the venue. There were a number of options but we went for an all white arrangement using predominantly local flowers so that the location could make the most impact.
We personalised our wedding with some items we bought from home such as a vintage suitcase and globe for the gift table, gold table runners and signs from Etsy and notonethehighstreet.com and gold candle holders from H&M.
We also bought glass elephant ornaments out in Thailand that were used as table decorations and gifts for the guests to take home.
There were so many memorable moments! We absolutely loved the readings our bridesmaid and groomsman had written for the ceremony – one was a poem and the other was made up of quotes from Disney songs.
The speeches were also fantastic. We had a couple of funny moments too – including a Chaing Mai lantern getting caught in the tree above the food stations, I remember vividly thinking the whole wedding was about to go up in flames but luckily staff had a big stick to get it out!
Also, the wedding planner never sent our song request list to the DJ but luckily friends stepped in and we ended up having UK Garage dance-offs for the Brits and the boys from Australia doing the Melbourne Shuffle in the sand.
When it comes to destination weddings I recommend hiring a wedding planner to be on site with you if you are keen for everything to be perfect on the day. We had a planner in the lead up but a lot of their requests were forgotten by the venue on the day so it was left to us to follow up. I wrote some more advice for destination weddings here.
Such a stunning destination wedding and doesn’t Jayne look amazing in her floral wedding dress! Want to read more about her wedding? She also writes about her big day here and here.
Love destination weddings? Check these out stunners…
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wedding credits / photographer: darin images / wedding venue: the sarojin, khao lak, thailand / brides dress: jennifer gifford designs / brides veil: jennifer gifford designs / grooms suit: country road / brides shoes: jimmy choo, forever soles / grooms shoes: topman / bridesmaid dresses: chi chi london / bridesmaid shoes: forever soles / hair & makeup: neil donkin / florist: the sarojin / wedding cake: the sarojin / cake topper: etsy / catering: the sarojin
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So Beautiful, I love the simplicity of everything surrounding the wedding, it really makes you concentrate on the bride and groom.
Wishing you both all the joy and happiness for your wedding ceremony and for a super happy conjugal life afterwards! Congratulations to some of my favorite people.
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