DIY Your Wedding

It’s so hard to believe that at this time last year I was in full throttle wedding planning mode. Once the holidays were officially over, I entered compulsive planning mania and idea overload. Unfortunately, after meeting with vendors, I realized these ideas I’d fallen in love with were far beyond my budget! At this point is when I realized I was going to need to DIY. A LOT of it. I left several aspects to the professionals, i.e. I didn’t think a camera and a selfie stick slung over my shoulder would look very good with my dress. The aspects I was able to DIY (with the help of friends and family) saved LOADS of money, and enabled me to have my dream wedding afterall!

If you don’t have an inner crafter to DIY your wedding, fear not, it’s not too late to develop one!

DIY wedding flowers

DIY’ing our flowers was by far the biggest savings of all of my DIY projects. After meeting with 3 florists, I realized how ridiculously overpriced wedding flowers are and how much price gouging there is for this occasion specifically. After perusing vendors on Wedding Wire, I discovered a place called The Flowerman where you can DIY your wedding flowers (they also had a full service option as well). After my consultation where they helped me pick out my flowers, 2 days before the wedding my mom, 4 friends and I all went to their shop and put together ALL of the floral arrangements for the wedding, while our “floral coach” guided us every step of the way. None of us had experience with any kind of flower arranging, but with their direction I was absolutely thrilled with how all of our flowers turned out. Not only did I love the flowers, but we had so much fun as a group putting them together, as you can see above. 🙂 Although this particular company is local to Columbus and Dayton, Ohio, through research I discovered that programs like this exist in many other parts of the country. Just google DIY wedding flowers and you will see a ton of options.

DIY wedding ceremony programs

Although I did DIY our wedding programs, afterwards I saw all of these on Pinterest and wished I had done one of them! Clockwise you see DIY photo ceremony programs from The Knot, DIY layered wedding programs found on LCI Paper and DIY wedding program fans featured on Wedding Chicks (great for a hot, outdoor wedding!)

DIY wedding card box

Although the beautiful card box on the right is available to buy on Etsy, it will take $119 out of your wedding budget. There are loads of tutorials on DIY wedding card boxes just like it on Pinterest. You can buy Paper Mache Card Boxes for $12 bucks on Amazon, plus whatever materials you choose to decorate it.

DIY wedding cake topper

This sparkly cake topper was another idea I saw online that they were charging $65 dollars for. I took a stab at this one and it turned it looking just like the one I saw online. I found the unfinished wood letters and ampersand with stakes on Craft Cuts, for around $5 each, painted them white, then applied a layer of gloss finish Mod Podge, followed by a healthy sprinkling of iridescent glitter. Once that dried, I applied another layer of mod podge, and sprinkled aqua glitter heavily on the bottom of the letters, gradually decreasing the amount of aqua glitter as I worked my way up to allow the iridescent glitter to show through and create an ombré affect, then another coat of mod podge so I didn’t end up with glitter all over the cake. If you have a Cricut Maker, you could even cut the wood letters out yourself!

DIY candle holders

I found these DIY candle holders too late for our wedding. Clockwise are DIY tutorials beautiful glitter tealight holders you can find on the Wedding Star blog, icicle candle holders, these fun glitzy candle holders by Love This Crazy Life and frosted candle holders by The Hyper House.

DIY wedding favors

DIY place cards & holders

Our wedding favors were really more DIY-ish. We wanted to do a photo booth at our wedding, so we bought photo strip frames as a favor for our guests. I bought a bunch of 8 1/2″ x 11″ heavy card stock at Hobby Lobby in our wedding color and to create inserts for the frames. I created a document with 4 columns and copied the text in to each column. 4 fit per sheet and I copied them on the high quality print setting on my home inkjet printer. My mom cut them in 4’s with my craft paper cutter to fit the frames. The inserts welcomed the guests, invited them to enjoy the photo booth and post their pictures to our Instagram hashtag.

I made our place cards out of white business cards. 2 of my bridesmaids wrote each guest’s name on them since my handwriting looks like a 5 year old’s. We then dipped the tops in mod podge, followed by a dip in the aqua glitter from the cake topper, and another dip in mod podge.

We made the place card holders out of wine corks (I had many corks donated from friends and family!) There’s a great tutorial on making these on Mint Design Blog.

Don’t forget about favors for the kids! This printable coloring book is such a great idea I saw on Bridal Musings.

DIY Menus

DIY table numbers

I used the same aqua card stock to print our menu, 2 columns worked perfectly, and then just printed them on the high quality setting on my home computer and cut them in half. I used the same paper cut in quarters to make the table numbers. I bought number stamps, stamped them with silver metallic ink and embossed them with silver metallic embossing powder and embossing heat tool. I love these fun table numbers I found on Wedding Bee with pics chronicling the bride and groom at varying ages based on however many tables there are.

DIY wedding guest room door hangers

I had so much fun creating a bunch of fun guest room DIYs with Cricut, one of them being these guest room door hangers!

If you’re planning a wedding, what do you think about these ideas? Do you have any DIY projects that you’re considering? If you’re already married, did you DIY anything for your wedding? I’d love to see your ideas and pictures!

Thanks for reading, have a great week!

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