With an on-trend colour palette of serenity blue & rose quartz.

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We always warn DIY wedding couples that it can be a lot of work, but when you see a DIY wedding as beautiful as Aoife and Will's its easy to see why so many couples are tempted to go homemade. Making the most of her organisational background Aoife decorated their barn wedding to perfection - with lots of playful details and a romantic colour palette of pale pink rose quartz and serenity blue. Matilda Delves captured all the fun and were excited to share all the inspiration with you today...

A fun Great Higham Barn wedding by Matilda Delves // see the rest on onefabday.com

Irish bride Aoife met her British beau when she began working at Westminster Cathedral in London. Aoife was managing their professional choir and Will was one of their singers. Aoife remembers... A friendship blossomed first (we were both in relationships at the time), and we spent a lot of time together, gossiping, dreaming and eating our way around Brixton’s epicurean delights. A relationship felt inevitable after a while and we haven’t looked back since.

Eager to get his proposal just right, Will bought a ring and had it remodelled not once, but twice! Aoife describes... Will tells me he was sitting on the ring for a while. He knew I would like something with a bit of history (having diligently paid attention when I was helping a friend), but he wanted to make it mine, so he had a vintage ring remodelled – twice, in fact (ever the perfectionist.) When he popped the question, we were in our local park, having a picnic. He’d been trying to come up with the perfect scenario, but in the end, he said it just felt right at that moment. And it was perfect!

When it came time to pick a venue Aoife and Will considered all options, including a city wedding in Dublin, but ultimately chose a rustic, but elegant, barn wedding in the UK.

The outdoor wedding was sunshine filled and brimming with fun details. Aoife describes... Making the day personal was really important to us, so I incorporated a lot of DIY projects including the flowers (bouquets and arrangements), the envelope guestbook, the Percy and Penny Pig bar, the ceremony and reception décor, the bar (we took a trip over to Calais and sourced a carload of prosecco from Majestic Wine at a very, very reasonable price), favours (handmade chocolates themed to our birthplaces which doubled as a place setting), table plan etc.

The ceremony was also hugely personal with lots of input from friends and personalised music choices. Aoife gives us the details... The choir that sang at the ceremony was made up of our friends/colleagues and they did an amazing job. I couldn’t help but blub as they sang ‘Mo Ghile Mear’ as we walked in – not least because the majority of them were from the UK. My friend Méabh sang the solo beautifully. We wanted to keep the service short and sweet, so we added two other pieces: The Bluebird by Stanford (with our friend Emilia Morton making everyone cry with her solo) and my good friend and colleague Desmond Earley did an arrangement of the Brindisi Chorus from La Traviata for us as a recessional. That was really fun and totally appropriate for the party to come!

The party was colourful and playful with lots of games for all the younger guests and thoughtful extras for the grown ups too. Aoife details... Early on I got it into my head that I wanted to make a giant version of the South American dice game, Perudo. The choir at Westminster Cathedral play it every Sunday lunchtime, with our best man/chief bridesmaid Ian (he was on double duty) being a Perudo World Championship runner-up. Sourcing wood cubes big enough was a challenge in itself, but 18 or so cubes into the 30 needing to be painted, I started to question my brilliance, however much a laugh it might get. Seeing the glee on their faces whilst playing was totally worth it!

The colour palette for all the DIY extras was serenity blue, rose quartz and lavender - which Aoife confesses she got a little bit obsessed with... I got a bit carried away with the colour theme (serenity blue, rose quartz and lavender) and tied that in as much as I could with the lanterns, pompoms, flowers and napkins. There was a moment when everything arrived that I thought I might have gone overboard, but because we didn’t have table linen and given we had a ‘blank canvas’ to work with, it seemed to tie in really well.

To complete the wedding decorations Aoife's niece Róisín made a Mr. Grumpy cake-topper, as a nod to Will's Mr Grumpy nickname.

Impressively organised bride Aoife has some words of advice for any of you who hope to DIY... Do lots of research – there are oodles of bargains to be had – but hold off on deciding on any one element until you have your venue in place, as this will determine the overall style and vibe of the day. Determine your priorities early on, and the rest will fall into place. In total, I probably spent four full days planning. I did a lot early on (the priorities like the venue, catering, photographer, marquee, dress) and then let it settle for a while before I hit fire on any of the décor. I really shopped around on this and got some great deals. Some of it felt frivolous at the time (paper parasols?!), but when I see the pictures (the kids loved them!), it was completely worth it.

Huge congratulations to you both and thanks so much for sharing your DIY barn wedding with us all. A big thank you also goes to Matilda Delves for sharing her work with us. To see more from Matilda Delves visit www.matildadelvesweddingphotography.com