Wedding DIY

I started this blog four years ago in order to write about my wedding planning adventures.  We didn't have a big budget and knew that there were projects we could tackle ourselves in order to save money.

With wedding season fast approaching, I decided to revisit a few of them.

Looking back, I realize that I am probably the only person who cared what these little bottles looked like.  I spent hours working on these.  The labels are printed on address labels.  When I began applying them to each bottle, I discovered they wouldn't stick to the plastic.  Enter: Super Glue.

The bows were a huge pain so I did a few at a time.  Super Glue was also my friend here.  I applied a drop of glue to each knot to hold them in place.

With Easter only a couple of months before our wedding, I decided to pick up a basket once they went on clearance.  I'm so glad I did.  I bought my basket for $1.  It was pink and just took a few coats of white spray paint and some ribbon to make it work with our colors.

I'm not entirely sure where my mother found the ring bearer pillow.  I added the ribbon to spruce it up a bit.  Both of these items were being carried around by 2 year old children, so we definitely didn't want to splurge.

This was the end of our custom aisle runner.  I saw people online charging a bunch of money to make these and figured out how to do it myself.  I created the image using Power Point and enlarged the size of the document.  It printed out on several pages, which I then trimmed and taped together.  A bit of tracing, a bit of painting, and my aisle runner was done!  I spent $20 on an aisle runner I was going to get regardless and $5-10 on paint supplies.

I used the same image from our aisle runner and bubbles on our unity candle.  One large pillar candle, two tapers, and some ribbon.  Easy peasy!

Here is where we saved a bunch of money.  I made all of the stationery for our wedding invitations.  Invitation companies will send you free samples of their products, so I ordered a couple dozen several different ones and designed one of our own.  I bought the invitation kit at Michael's Crafts using a 40% off coupon.  It included 100 invitations (size 5.5 X 8.5) and 100 envelopes.  With the coupon the kit was less than $10.  I also created RSVP postcards (cheaper stamps!) and a map to our reception venue.

When calling around for bouquet prices, the prices I had quoted were all $100+.  We made mine for $30.  My mom's friend wrapped each stem in floral wire to create the shape.  She then wrapped the stems in floral tape and covered them with white satin ribbon.  My bouquet contained three dozen red roses that we bought at Wal-Mart the day before the wedding.

*Ignore the terrible photo quality.  This was four years and a crappy camera ago!