Wedding Craft Extravaganza

As you may remember, I am engaged.  Being I have been writing here less and less over the past year (shameful, I admit) I understand how that fact might be easy to forget at this point.  Fortunately, my long engagement has allowed me to focus on several wedding crafts over the past year, which I will now list in detail.

Now, I probably don't need to explain that a craft addict planning a wedding is like throwing gasoline on an already steady flame.  Sure, I always had a few crafting projects happening here and there, but suddenly I had a wedding date and a timeline and a whole new myriad of crafting opportunities awaited me.  

Shipley has enjoyed helping me with my wedding crafts.  In this case, he played a pivotal role with the invitations.

The following is my list of DIY projects that I've been working on for my "big day".  Some are finished at this point, some are not, but I am determined for all them to make an impact on my wedding guests.  If I was a blogger who had more time I would have drawn out each project into it's own blog post, but alas... perhaps that can be a project for when I have professional photo's of the finished products.

1.  Crepe Flowers in Painted Bottles.  I bought a case of 20 small bottles on Etsy, coated the insides with purple paint, waited far too long for the bottles to dry and voila - purple bottles.  I have also made dozens and dozens of crepe paper flowers to go inside the bottles for extra decor.  

2.  Wine Cork "Bar" Sign.  One of my bridesmaids helped me with this one.  Rather than drink myself into oblivion to obtain hundreds of wine corks, I copped out and bought used wine corks on Etsy.  (What a job, selling used wine corks!  There is a market for anything, people!  After all, I totally bought them...!)  Using my trusty glue gun, this project was surprisingly easy - and will hopefully bring a little something extra to my bar area!

3.  Lucky Bamboo Centerpieces.  Guys, flowers are expensive.  An alternative fresh solution that is not expensive?  Lucky bamboo!  Bonus: my fiance is Chinese, and bamboo is a symbol of luck and fortune in Chinese culture.  Perfect!  I ordered a bunch of lucky bamboo online in bulk, gathered some square vases and pebbles from the Dollar Tree (the dollar store literally has everything - don't buy it unless you've checked the dollar store first!), and boom - centerpieces complete.  

Confession - I actually ordered and assembled my lucky bamboo centerpieces several months ago so they had time to grow and become leafy, but sadly this was not successful.  Unless you are accustomed to turning a room of your house into a small greenhouse, I recommend waiting until you are closer to your event date...!  

4.  Crepe Flower Escort Cards.  This one was super time consuming.  Thank goodness for Gilmore Girls and Netflix.  Almost a year ago, I saw something on pinterest about having a paper flower escort card for each wedding guest with their table number on it.  I immediately thought:  "what a lovely idea!".  I promptly bought plenty of crepe paper, floral tape and floral wire.  Some day I will do a blog tutorial on crepe flowers, because they really are SO EASY and SO INEXPENSIVE.  Just prepare yourself if you need to assemble 300 of them, like I did...  wow.  Anyway, I am now finished with them, and hopefully the majority of them won't end up on the floor at the end of the night...!

5.  Crepe Flower Topiaries.  At weddings there are a lot of tables.  Dessert tables, guestbook tables, gift tables, snack tables, buffet tables, favor tables, the list goes on.  How does one decorate all of those tables??  Topiaries were my answer, although I certainly won't have them on every table.  These took me FOREVER - again, a great idea in theory, but super time consuming in practice.  To assemble, I bought tiered tealight holders from the dollar store and super glued them on to foam balls from Michaels.  Then, I assembled hundreds of crepe paper flowers, and hot glued them to the foam ball.  I made 8 topiaries, and each one took me 2 episodes of Gilmore Girls.  (And I only burned myself TWICE!)

Cameo by Rory Gilmore.

6.  Teacup Candle Favors.  These are actually going to be favors at my bridal shower.  I know technically it is a small faux pas for me to be providing my own bridal shower favors, but come on!  How could I not??  I have obviously not made these yet, but am in the process of collecting teacups from local thrift stores.  You can find some gorgeous ones for very cheap if you take the time to look. (Shout out for www.ShopGoodwill.com)  So pretty!

This concludes my list of wedding crafts - all in all, I think I showed a fair amount of restraint.  Hopefully I will have some lovely finished photo's of these crafts in the future.  In the meantime, I hope I have inspired you with a couple of new projects.  Details to come!