With tradition, community and family a priority for Josie and Jeff, they planned a colourful day where all the guests and locals of Valentia Island played a part in making the day as special as possible. Debs Ivelja was on hand to capture all the action and fun of the day...

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When you're standing on Valentia Island, they say next stop America and suddenly two far away countries that were once divided by the Atlantic Ocean are connected. An important detail for today's lovebirds, Josie and Jeff. After meeting at a duck cook off competition (I kid you not!) American born Jeff was charmed by straight talking Josie and after a fun filled first date they were headed for the ailse. With tradition, community and family a priority for the pair, they planned a colourful day where all the guests and locals of Valentia Island played a part in making the day as special as possible. Debs Ivelja was on hand to capture all the action and fun of the day...

We've featured a LOT of real weddings in our three years of One Fab Day, and I have to say, that how Josie and Jeff met, goes down as one of the more unusual stories... "We met at a competitive duck-cooking dinner (there's such a thing??). Jeff was doing his masters at Oxford and I’d recently finished mine. Mutual friends organized a “duck off” – people put put in teams of three and each had to cook and bring a duck. Despite his best efforts (he slyly tried to move his name card but my dear friend hissed at him that the table plan was SET), Jeff and I ended up sitting next to each other. Much of our conversation over dinner consisted of my castigating him for complaining about the weather (he’s American) and criticising Americans who come to England and moan about the rain, while simultaneously boasting about how Brits have no idea what bad weather is really like; you have to go to America for that. Shortly after that I abandoned him to go and attack a pile of Krispy Kremes. But a few days later, I emailed him to see if he wanted to meet for a drink sometime, luring him to London with a duck-based joke. We drank the night away, I missed the last tube home (which I never do) and that was that. Funnily enough, on the way to the duck dinner, he told his friends that he was sure he was going to meet his wife that night. When they asked him afterwards whether he had, he said no!"Little did he know that just a couple of years later he'd be planning a proposal to win the fair lady's hand...

Like all too many proposals, it wouldn't quite work out the way he planned it... Josie wasn't really in the mood for a randomly romantic trip, but he persevered... "I had flown to America to visit his family and the day I arrived we went up to the beach in Maine. That evening, as we were finishing dinner, he suggested we went kayaking. I refused. He suggested it again. And again. And again. Grumpily, I finally conceded. We paddled our way out to sea, my moaning continuing. He pointed out dreamily that we could see the setting sun and the rising moon at the same time. I replied that you could only do so if you flicked your neck from side to side very fast and that hurt. We got to an outcrop of rocks and to my disgust he insisted we land and get out of the kayaks. Fortunately, my grumbling did not deter him and under the moonlight he proposed."

A sense of belonging was an important factor when it came choosing where the couple would be married, they wanted it to be somewhere that they would return to, somewhere that was not only beautiful but meaningful. Given that Josie's Great Great Grandfather was the rector on Valentia Island donkeys years ago, and she has been going there every year of her life, the little island off the coast of Kerry seemed the natural choice "it felt like getting married at home but had all the excitement and holiday-ness of being away."

The couple were married by Josie's godfather and sister in a beautiful service which was personal, funny and very special. At one point there was a mention of gin and tonics for the guests during the ceremony - Sounds like my kind of wedding!

"We wanted it to be as relaxed and fun as possible. Unfortunately, we also wanted to do as much as we could ourselves which doesn’t always end up being very relaxing but really we wanted everyone to have fun, to have a bit of a holiday, to enjoy the beauty of Valentia. It sounds a bit silly, but we wanted people to have a bit of a sense of being part of the community of our wedding - for there to be a lingering feeling long after the party was over. It's been so lovely since then to hear of friends who had never met before visiting each other in far-flung cities, a feeling that somehow the wedding lives on."

There's nothing like a little hard work to build a community, and given the couple wanted a really personal celebration created by themselves, family and friends were inevitably roped into help in all sorts of ways days were spent making and hanging tissue paper pompoms, baking cakes, arranging flowers, ferrying people to and from the airport, folding programmes and generally doing everything they could to make it wonderful.

Our mothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, brothers-in-law, friends made all the desserts and decorated the room. Everyone was so happy to help with the most ridiculous things (fold 100 paper cones made from pages from Jeff's favourite work of philosophy? Of course.).

Lots of delicious food and drink was a priority... We wanted to come up with something different. So we brought vast quantities of salami and parma ham and olives and other antipasti over with us (well, we actually got the guests arriving last to bring it for us – you’d be amazing how much cured meat you can fit in Ryanair’s hand luggage allowance) and got lots of local smoked salmon and soda bread and put it all out on big platters for everyone to pick it. It was absolutely delicious and there was lots of it!

Personally I couldn't agree more with the words of advice that Josie has to share, and I'm betting a lot of former brides would agree "You won't get everything done. Some things will be abandoned. That's ok. You won't notice or care. Buy lots of fizz - 100 bottles of prosecco is much better than 30 bottles of champagne!"

A big congradulations to Josie and Jeff on their colourful wedding day!

Of course a big thank you goes to Debs Ivelja for sharing her work with us at One Fab Day! To see more of Debs Ivelja's work pop on over to www.debsivelja.com/blog/

The Wedding Details