Sunday, October 4, 2015

Wedding DIYs

This is going to be a long one!!  

The wedding is finally over!  It was a stressful, exciting, amazing day, but I'm glad it's over and I can finally call Alex my husband!  We had a wonderful honeymoon and we've finally moved in to our house!  Without further adieu, it's finally time to to share all of my DIY projects for the wedding!

To start--you can't have a wedding if you don't invite people, right?  So, after figuring out what I wanted to do and seeing how much the pre-made, ordered invites actually were, I decided to make my own.  I've seen it a lot on Pinterest and it really wasn't too hard.  So I went to Hobby Lobby and bought some card stock, twine and glue dots, then ordered doilies from Amazon and got to working!  While I found doilies at other stores, they weren't as intricate as I liked.  I made the outline on Microsoft Publisher and used our printer's photo printing option to print them off in the correct size.  The information cards are made from the same cardstock, just cut smaller!
Finished product!  It took quite a long time, but I love them!
One of the next things that had to be done was to pop the question to my bridesmaids!  I knew I wanted to make something that the girls would wear to the wedding.  So, I found these cute little lockets on Etsy (shop: BrassKicker) and bought the pearls, chain and clasps from Hobby Lobby/Michaels and put it all together!  But what to put it in?  I bought these little glass tubes and dresses from Michael's and added a hook onto the cork and put the necklaces in them!

My most favorite project was definitely my bouquet.  I always knew that I wanted something different that involved using antique brooches.  I have been eyeballing the fabric flower and brooch bouquets for years, only to realize that they can cost just as much (if not more) than real flowers.  SO, I decided to make my own.  I used a lot of different types of fabric flowers from almost anywhere you can imagine...Michael's, Hobby Lobby, and even Marshall's and TJ Maxx. 
 I bought way more than I needed because I wasn't sure what all I wanted/needed or what would look best.  The individual flowers were mostly hair clips which made it very easy to attach them to the bouquet.  I used wire to wrap the non-clip flowers and attach them to the base.
I used the flower ball as a base.  The peony bouquets were obviously used as the stem handle. 
I pinned the brooches to my favorite flowers and then just started clipping/wrapping the flowers onto the flower ball!
At the end, I wrapped some twine around the "stems" to complete the handle.
Finished product!!!
I also wanted to add something special...
For the family members that couldn't be there on our big day, I had them with me the whole time!

While we are on the topic of flowers--I made the guys their boutonniere, too!  Since we got married in a barn, we wanted something country-esque.  So, what better than bullets?  I glued the pins to the bullets and wrapped them with a little bit of lace.  I bought the flowers from JoAnn Fabrics and just shoved them into the bullets and there you have it!

The wood tags were bought at a boutique store and I wood burned their names onto them! 
I also made the mom's and grandmother's corsages.  Very easy, just bought the pearl bracelets and glued the flowers (from Michael's) onto ribbon wrapped around them!

We planned to use a wood slab for our cake topper, but didn't end up using it because it had flowers on top!  I used my woodburner to make the B.

Gifts!  Of course I had to include a little DIY into the bridal party's gifts! 
Woodburned the bridesmaid's names into the wood slabs for their hangers (which were purchased from TJ Maxx)
This is what the tags from the previous picture ended up being used for!
A few of my favorite decor pieces were these old windows and shutters that I bought from various antique shops!
Thankfully the panes were about the same size as a piece of printer paper, so I just printed out what I wanted to say and wrote over it with a chalk pen. Made it look very nice since my cursive is not great!
Please ignore the off-center picture...it fell off during the move and was just quickly stuck back on!
This was one of the most time consuming projects I took on...When I originally bought this, it was just the frame.  SO, I added the chicken wire to hang the pictures on.  Since our lovely staple gun was not working (and probably wouldn't have worked well anyway-it would need very small staples), I had to use thumbtacks to attach it.  Also, have you ever worked with chicken wire?  It hurts.  But the end result was work it :)
 For the favors we had wildflower seed bombs!  I bought the seeds off Etsy (shop: FreeMountainDesigns) and used the leftover cardstock from our invitations!  Hot gluing was the easiest way to attach them since they weren't completely flat on the back :)  Apparently they work, too, because Alex's work family had planted theirs while we were on our honeymoon and they already started growing after a week!

Based on the Etsy shop's included instructions!

We decided to do the "cord of 3 strands" ceremony.  We had a spare piece of wood that we stained and I used painter pens to write the verse on.  We bought the rope from Michael's and drilled two little holes in the back to attach it with wire.  It turned out well and can now be a very meaningful piece of decor in our house! 
If you or anyone you know want to do this, THIS is the reading we gave our officiant to use while we braided the cord.


Okay, I think that's actually all!  It was a lot of planning and projects but it was well worth it!!  Hope you enjoyed it all! :)

3 comments:

  1. Alicia, I love your windows to replace a ceremony program. Can you tell me what font you used? My daughter is getting married in the fall and I would like to replicate this idea.

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    1. Phil, I'm so sorry I'm just now seeing this! Thank you for the compliment, I'm hoping it's not too late since you said your daughter is getting married this fall. I used a program called "PicMonkey" to find the font I wanted. I simply edited a "blank" picture and typed the names of our wedding party using the font "Sacramento." You can either do a free trial with PicMonkey or pay for a membership. I hope this helps! Congratulations to your daughter!

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  2. And she is a dietician as well!

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