DIY Wedding Details

Hello friends!

After showing you how we DIY-ed our entire wedding (along with my top 10 tips), I've shown you, more in-depth, how we DIY-ed our wedding invitations, the programs, guest cards and sparkler holders, cupcake stand, and the ringerbearer pillow. These were all ideas that I came up with completely on my own.

Today, I'm going to round up all of the details that came directly from a tutorial or "Pin"spiration. This includes:

• Handpainted banners
• Flower girl dresses
• Flower pomanders for flower girls to carry
• Faux craspedia for boutonnieres and bouquets
• Twine globes
• "Cards" suitcase

Handpainted Banners

There wasn't one particular "pin" that inspired this, but rather, it was the theme of weddings I'd been seeing recently. I love the use of props in photos, so I knew I wanted to make a couple of banners--that way, they would double both as wedding decoration and photo prop. I had leftover cotton duck in a cream color (you could also used bleached drop cloth), cut out the pieces in the sizes I needed, then used iron-on adhesive to to wrap and hold the fabric around the twine. For the large banner, I actually found an advent calendar hanging from a small decorative dowel rod at the dollar store, so I bought it solely for the dowel rod and replaced the hanging ribbon with twine. From there, I just measured out my letters, sketched them in pencil and then painted them in with charcoal acrylic paint. 

Flower Girl Dresses

These came directly from a tutorial at Me Sew Crazy. Her "20-minute ruffle dress" took me longer than 20 minutes, but it was fairly simple for a sewing novice like myself!

Flower Pomanders

I found the tutorial for paper flower pomanders on Once Wed. Their photo below shows how easy this project was!

I also added wooden tags to ours; you can purchase wooden tags from Hobby Lobby (or other places, I'm sure) and 25 cents. I then stained them and wrote our initials on one and our wedding date on the other. After drilling a small hole through each, I attached them to the pomanders with some yellow thread and called it done!


Faux Craspedia and Wedding Flowers

When looking for flower inspiration, I ultimately decided I wanted my bouquet to be ranunculus and baby's breath, while I wanted the bridesmaids' bouquets and and the boutonnieres to be baby's breath and craspedia (a.k.a. billy buttons). However, what I didn't want was to special-order more off-season flowers than I really needed. So, when I saw this tutorial on Design*Sponge for faux craspedia, I knew I had to at least try it. Guess what! It worked, and we saved a lot of money as I spent less than $10 on the materials for all of them. We made 43 total, which required two packages of yellow wool roving and two packages of wire flower "stems," and I bought all of it with coupons (of course) from Hobby Lobby and JoAnn. Maybe people could tell they were faux, maybe they couldn't, but I thought they lent themselves well to our handmade wedding theme.

P.S. Yes, I did end up putting all of the boutonnieres and bouquets together myself two days before the wedding. I've never put any kind of bout or bouquet together before, so I definitely learned as I went. By the time I was working on my bouquet, friends/bridesmaids had arrived and they help me eyeball it, telling me if it was too "mountainous"! Also, I mentioned in our first wedding post that I special-ordered the ranunculus. This is the only thing I would change. Special-ordering flowers means expensive and I think I could have achieved a just-as-beautiful white bouquet by picking up whatever they had in stock that day. The ranunculus ended up being over half of our flower cost ($120 total) and they were so small that I ended up having to pick up what they had in the store anyway (which is also what I used to fill out the bouts and bridesmaids' bouquets). At $3 a bunch vs. the $3/stem I paid for ranunculus, I would have been much better off skipping the ordering and using what they had in stock!

Twine Globes

This is another that didn't come from a specific place, but rather I gathered information from various sources and put it all together. We ended up using a cornstarch/elmer's glue/water mixture. We found that dumping the twine or string in to the mixture and letting it soak for a bit helped when wrapping. Also, two people are definitely necessary! One needs to be wrapping the balloons and one needs to be feeding it to them, squeezing out the extra liquid as they go. After we allowed them to dry and cure for a couple of days, I gave them a coat of clear spray paint (so any amount of water wouldn't cause them deflate in a matter of seconds). We made them back in November and they're still holding up great around our house!

"Cards" Suitcase

 I saw this pin on Pinterest (only sourced back to a google image, so if you know where it's from, please let me know!) and wanted to re-create. So, I found a suitcase at Goodwill for a few bucks, spray-painted it gray (it was blue) and then lined the inside with a cute yellow-striped fabric and pom pom edging. I then picked out a font I liked, printed the large letters on cardstock at home, cut them out and glued a textured scrapbook paper to the front. Hot glue and mod podge were the only glues I used! This project cost less than $10 and we got a ton of comments and compliments.

I know that's a lot of information to handle, but I hope it's helpful! There were so many hours and so much love (and frustration) put into our projects that it made our wedding that much more special.

As we get into wedding season and many of you are in this "detail" mode, what are you working on?



P.S. ALL images, unless otherwise noted, are courtesy of Jackie Cooper Photo.
P.P.S. BIG news and exciting changes come to MYU in the month of April! Stay tuned!!