Bright and Colourful DIY Barn Wedding in Tetbury By Matt Parry

It’s all back to normal now after a few days off over Christmas and New Year. I have shared my best of 2013 posts with you, so now its time to get back to sharing with you some amazing real weddings! The first real wedding of 2014 is this fun and colourful wedding from Matt Parry. Joanna and Gareth decided to get married in a barn which meant they had a lot more freedom to have the wedding they wanted. There were free to decorate it as they wanted as well as bring in their own suppliers and caterers. Filled with bright DIY projects, as well as a DIY cake made by the groom, this wedding is bursting with colour, fun and lots of love. The perfect kick-start to the new year!

‘As cheesy as this sounds, our wedding day was a reflection of us as a couple. Friends and family played a massive part in making our day as fun filled as we had always wished for.’

Joanna and Gareth were married on the 30th of August at Kingscote Barn in Tetbury. ‘As soon as we turned off the main road and drove up the incredible long driveway to Kingscote Barn we knew it was for us. As well as the absolutely stunning views the Kingscote Barn is a venue that allows you to completely personalise your day. The venue was light and airy but was a blank canvas that allowed us to really put our own stamp on it. We didn’t want to be restricted to a venue’s own food and drink. At Kingscote Barn we were able to choose our caterers, decorate the venue how we wanted and it was exclusive to us so was just filled with all our lovely friends and family. We had 85 people to the day and just a small handful of extra people to the evening. We got engaged 2 years before and took our time planning and saving!!! For me planning the wedding was so much fun. We decided early on we wouldn’t get stressed with it and took time to choose recommended suppliers from wedding blogs and friends.’

How they met
We met at University 10 years ago where we had a drunken snog in a club!!!

The proposal
He did an amazing job! Absolutely fantastic night, starting with drinks and amazing views over London. Heading to a restaurant for dinner we headed through Hyde Park where he threw me off the scent by pretending to be lost before he got down on one knee in the rose garden in Hyde Park. Lots of tears and excited squeals later we headed for a fantastic meal and lots of champers before he surprised me on the way home by having booked a boutique hotel for the night in Kensington with yet more champagne!

How did you spend your budget?
We spent more on services such as the photography, videographer and the caterer and saved where we felt we could with DIY decorations, stationary and the cakes (which my clever hubby made and decorated all by himself)!

Why did you choose your photographer?
We chose our photographer, Matt Parry, after coming across his website. He offered a relaxed and fun approach to wedding photography and with lots of bright, colourful photos it seemed he was perfect to capture our day. We didn’t meet him before but had a quick chat on the phone. His website and photos sold him to us!

The dress
I actually had 2 dresses! My day dress was Aviles by San Patrick, Pronovios. It had a lot of detail and was made of chiffon. It was a beautiful dress but I had a few dress panics once I had collected it as I couldn’t turn it up as much as I had thought and as we had learnt a first dance it just wasn’t practical for the evening. Luckily with only 2 weeks to go I found online a beautiful Grecian style full length dress on Asos with a gold sequined band around the waist. It was the perfect combination of party and bridal! To go with both dresses I had some incredibly high Gold sandals from Vince Camuto which I got in the sale, which much to my surprise stayed on until half 10!! I had a mixture of jewellery I already owned, presents that were given to me for the day and some statement gold earrings for the evening.

The suit and bridesmaids
Gareth had a Hugo Boss suit that I didn’t see until the day. It fitted so well and was finished off with a navy tie and pocket square. The 2 bridesmaids had floor length, one shoulder royal blue dresses that we bought from the internet.

Theme or colour scheme
We tried not to have a colour theme and just wanted a bright and colourful day that was decorated with things we loved rather than because they made sense. We used fuscia in our on the day stationary, lots of white and yellow balloons and flowers and blue for the wedding party.

Decoration
We had a large space to fill and decorated the venue with a mixture of vintage and modern touches. We bought some amazing signs from PurplePeonyCouture on Etsy and these were dotted around the barn with lots of candles. Instead of using flowers for the table centres we made balloon table centres. A lot of our decoration was homemade but we also used Adorning Angels who hire out props for venues.

Flowers
I wanted to try not to have flowers at the wedding as I felt I could make lots of decorations instead. I really liked the idea of the brooch bouquets but in the end they were quite expensive and chickened out of not having any flowers at all so found Sara from Aqua Florist and asked her to supply the 3 bouquets, flower decoration for the main beam in the barn and 2 milk churns filled with flowers for the drinks buffet table. We kept the flowers to Gypsophilia and white and yellow Gerberas.

Food
We didn’t want to have the traditional 3 course wedding meal and in discussions with the amazing Crown Catering we designed a tapas menu that would be served in the middle of each table so that everyone could help themselves. It went down a treat and I only wish I could have eaten more!! We had canapés during the drinks reception, finished the meal off with a trio of desserts and in the evening we the caterers served individual pizzas that came out in take-away pizza boxes.

Cake
We didn’t want to spend a huge amount on the cake so very early on Gareth decided it couldn’t be that hard to make cupcakes himself! Much to everyone’s surprise they were delicious, looked fantastic and cost us less than £50 for 90 of them.

Entertainment
For the ceremony and drinks reception we hired Sam Jones to acoustically sing and play his guitar. He was a 16 year old from Cirencester and sang Jack Johnson’s Angels as I walked down the aisle and entertained our guests with a variety of songs for an hour or so after the ceremony. We invented a game for our guests to play during the drinks reception called ‘where in the world?’ We bought a 12 hole multi photoframe and added photos of ourselves in various places around the world. Guests had to guess where we were from the photo and we announced the winner after meal. In the evening we hired the Wedding Smashers to DJ and at the last minute booked a photobooth through Boothmania. I know a lot of couples have photobooths now but it went down a storm and even though we had been to lots of wedding that had them a lot of our guests still found it a new concept and really enjoyed it. It also gave us some hilarious videos and photos in our guest book.

Buy or DIY your Stationery?
I spent hours looking at stationary on Etsy. At the time though I didn’t have the skills to design my own wedding stationary so after lots of deliberation we bought a design from Rachel at Fine and Dandy Paperie on Etsy. We bought the design from her and she edited it to make it personal to us and then emailed us the jpeg so we could print it ourselves, saving money. I still got the DIY aspect of it as I bought some lovely yellow twine also from Etsy and spent quite a few hours putting them altogether and tying the twine around in a bow to hold into place. Because we also had the design on .jpeg we were also able to use bits of it transferred onto our on the day stationary such as the order of service and the seating plan. My Dad was a legend helping to put it altogether on his computer!

Personal or handmade touches
• The wedding has definitely brought out my creative side and I loved trying to make new things and come up with new ideas for our wedding. I managed to persuade our close family to all pitch in and use their talents to personalise our wedding and save us a few pennies!
• We bought a personalised rubber stamp from the DolceCaramella shop at Etsy and hand made lots of circle tags which we tied with divine twine to lots of glass jars we collected leading up to the wedding. We filled these with candles on the day and dotted them around the venue. Having the stamp meant we could personalise lots of bits we had such as the name place settings and sweetie bags.
• We didn’t want to have flowers as centre pieces and saw some amazing perfectly round balloons but found them too expensive to buy already decorated so went about experimenting and are so glad we made the effort to do them as was really pleased with the results. My mum sewed lots of cut out yellow hearts together on her sewing machine and we tied them to little lanterns that sat in the middle of each table.
• Instead of favours we provided a free bar in the evening as a surprise to our guests. We wrote a poem and printed it off on to graduated coloured paper before rolling them up to look like scrolls and placing them at each place setting.
• We bought some amazing signs from PurplePeonyCouture and HelloMyGemon on Etsy. They looked great in our photos and the ‘love drunk’ and ‘signature cocktails’ sign looked great with our drinks buffet we organised for the drinks reception. We had cocktails such as Pucker-up Pimms and Rum Romance.
• My Dad did an absolutely amazing job of making the name place settings for everyone. We bought some heart Kraft tags and thought of something that reminded us of each person. My dad found photos of that something and stuck them on to the tags on one side with the name on the other. It was a big job as everyone’s was personal but was so worth it and they all loved them.

Special moments or highlights
We learnt a dance before the day with Kevin at Wowtheguests.com and the first dance was definitely one of the highlights of the day. We didn’t tell any of our guests about our first dance so seeing the looks on everyone’s faces and enjoying 2 minutes of pure fun with my new husband was absolutely amazing and has left me great memories and some amazing photos! We danced to a Beyoncé medley that included Gareth picking me up, spinning me around and dropping me to the floor as well as lots of strutting around the dance floor and compulsory booty shaking!! As a surprise for my husband I wrote him a poem which I read during the speeches. I loved reading it out and surprisingly enough I wasn’t even nervous.

Biggest surprise
The biggest surprise for me was how nervous I was on the morning of the wedding. I really wasn’t expecting it and I’m still not sure why now! Even a run and some yoga on the morning couldn’t help! Although as soon as I was in my dress the nerves disappeared!

Advice for other couples
My advice would be to do exactly what you want and not what will keep others happy. You will never please everyone so just do what’s right for you.