Colourful Fun & Games Festival Camp Hidden River Barn Weddin

Laura and Gina blew it out of the water with their Hidden River Barn wedding in Cumbria in the summer. Their wedding was a total explosion of multicolours, fun and loads of entertaining games.

Think festival vibes, complete with WWW Faves, Event Flag Hire and Wedfest providing the festival flags and cool stationery respectively, as well as a whole weekend of camping festivities. It was epic. I love the colourful smoke bombs, the stylish outfits and all of the personal touches.

Big thanks go to Kirsty Rockett Photography for sharing these stupendous images with us. There are just so many wedding ideas to take away here. Enjoy it all.

Hidden River Barn Wedding

The Proposal

This was a somewhat elaborate affair! Normally for Gina’s birthday I will do a treasure hunt around the house, but I planned something a bit more elaborate and roped in a lot of our friends and family!!!

On Gina’s birthday I went downstairs to make breakfast and then secretly met Gina’s best-friend Tracey downstairs. I went out to walk the dog and Tracey took the breakfast upstairs to Gina with the first clue.

Gina then went on a treasure hunt around our local town and into Manchester following the clues of all the places that have special meaning to our relationship (our first date/first house/first kiss/where we met etc) I think there were 14 stops in total. At every point there was a friend/family member with a present and another clue! The whole thing took from 8am till around 6pm as she had to get trains etc. Tracey sent me a video of all the stops and at one point I thought I had broken her as she kept crying!!!

Then she got back home with instructions to get ready, and she was transported (blindfolded) to a local venue where we all shouted surprise and then I got down on one knee and proposed in front of everyone and then partied the evening away!

It was excellent!

The Vision

We are very blessed with lovely family and friends, and we have always joked that the only time you get everyone together at the same time is your wedding and your funeral – and you don’t enjoy the latter!

We wanted something that was a cross between a family holiday, a festival and a rugby tour! (I play). We wanted to spend as much time with everyone as we could as well as making sure all our guests had a great time.

The Venue

Hidden River Barn at Hidden River Cabins in Carlisle

Your Outfits

Neither of us are very precious about what we look like, so this was not a huge part of our budget – we spent more on the hay bales for the space hopper racing course than we did on our dresses!

As we had 3 nights of celebration, we had 3 dresses each! I think the total was £200 each from ASOS/Tesco/Amazon/Chichi.

THE BEST bit was the lovely lady that fitted my dress managed to put in POCKETS!!!

The Ceremony & Music

I LOVE music! And had a playlist for every bit of the day!

I arrived on the back of my dad’s Harley to Stevie Nicks edge of seventeen and walked down the aisle to Chantal Kreviazuk’s feels like home.

Gina walked down the aisle with her son and grandson to Paul Simons ‘Something so right’

That’s our reception drinks playlist which may be the best playlist ever made!!!

The ceremony was a perfect combination of perhaps some more traditional stuff and personal touches. We went for a celebrant ceremony so we could design it just the way we wanted.

We were married in a circle of sunflowers that were placed by family members. As they came up our celebrant described the aspects of their personalities we wanted to take in our marriage – kindness/fun and laughter/being an excellent baker etc! That was really special and so personal.

We wrote our own vows and I rick rolled Gina promising ‘never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down….’ Luckily, she thought it was funny and I made up for it by including some nice promises too!!!!

Your Photographer & Filmmaker

Photographer – Kirsty Rockett Photography

Videographer – Eleven Six Films

The Styling & Decor

We had handmade (165!) camping mugs and decorated them ourselves, so these were our place settings. Lots of sunflowers and gnomes (Gina loves gnomes!).

We had lots of garden games outside – football/table tennis/quoits/giant pass 5e pigs etc and we had given everyone coloured wristbands beforehand to separate everyone into teams (what is the point of competitive games if you can’t score points!!!).

We had amazing rainbow flags and bunting that really helped the festival/camping theme and look amazing in the photos.

Gina’s son and partner handmade wooden signs around the site with directions to the various cabins/areas

Gina had paper flowers that were absolutely stunning with a charm of her late brother Colin which were very special.

We had a ‘gardening’ themed sweetie bar where we had 2 rustic barrels and filled them with plant pots filled with sweets and used chocolate cake to look like soil. The scoopers were little trowels with candied worms coming out of the soil!

We had an amazing lady from Glitter Pack come and put glitter on everyone’s faces – obviously the kids loved it but later on most of the adults were adorned with glitter beards/Moustaches/heads and even full chest pieces!

The Honeymoon

We are planning on going to Sri Lanka and the Maldives later this year but didn’t want to do it straight after as we already felt we had a holiday – being there for 4 nights!

We spent a few nights in the lakes that were lovely on a mini moon.

Memorable Moments

Our first dance! We had this choreographed and did a quick step to ‘you make my dreams come true’.

When the speeches were ongoing Steph, the amazing woman from Glitter Pack took the slightly more restless kids and set up their own little shop!

We had 35 kids at the wedding and 3 dogs and one of our favourite bits was they all just grabbed the games and had the best time! It was lovely as it was just like a family holiday where everyone is looking after the kids so the parents could relax and have a good time. The kids all went absolutely feral, and parents have told us that we have ruined future weddings as some of the kids now think all weddings come with a bouncy castle/laser quest/football pitch and sports day!

My mum is a retired schoolteacher and took all the kids to make fires for s’mores using flints and ‘fairy blankets and oil’ (cotton wool and Vaseline!!!).

We had a ceilidh on the Sunday night which was absolutely fantastic – although some of guests did comment if we are running some sort of post wedding boot camp after the sports day and then skipping up and down the hall! GALLOP!

We did a quiz on the Friday night which was a lovely wash for everyone to get to meet each other and have a chat before the wedding (also to score points for their teams!)

One of the loveliest bits was just wandering round the site and everyone you saw was a friend/family member. When we went for a walk on our minimoon and were like ‘why is everyone not saying hello to us!’

Advice For Other Couples

1, GET A WEDDING PLANNER CALLED LINZI! Obviously a 3-day affair takes a lot of organisation and Linzi was invaluable. On the day we could just relax and enjoy it – we didn’t have to worry about where we needed to be and when and at certain points would just have a little nudge that we needed to cut the cake etc. We were both just so relaxed and so happy throughout the weekend. Things definitely went wrong but we only found out about afterwards as Linzi and Seb just quietly sorted them out. Worth her weight in GOLD.

2, If you can try and do something the day after/before/both. The wedding day goes past so quickly and it’s lovely to have the day after to have time to sit and have a chat with everyone and find out all the gossip from the day before!

3, If you have kids coming (and we had a lot!) put some entertainment on and give the parents’ permission to let them do what they want! The games outside did not cost a huge amount at all but meant all the kids were happy and running round so the parents could enjoy themselves.

4, Prioritise your budget. We spent the most money on the things that matter to us – fun and entertainment and less on our dresses and flowers etc.

5, Put the prep work in and then Let. It. Go. Things will go wrong – suppliers may let you down, the weather may not be what you want etc. Try and have plans for things if they do go wrong but just let go of all of that on the day and enjoy it. We both had the best weekend of our lives (and our guests did too – they are all nagging us to renew our vows and do it all again!!!).