Weddingbee Blog

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I guess I am not Martha Stewart after all. If you’ve experienced DIY-fail, never fear; you are not alone. The internet is overflowing with DIY projects for brides-to-be, and sometimes I am just amazed at what people pull off. I’ve certainly had a few hiccups along the way with some of my DIY projects, and I can’t say there won’t be more! Here are a few trip-ups so far…

1. Muslin OOT bags with custom stamp. This took a stumble right away. I gave our invitation motif design to an unfortunate Etsy seller who, of course, had trouble whittling out all the tiny details to perfection. In the end, I had to order it from a mass production center. For our OOT baggies, I pictured muslin bags decorated with our adorable stamp. Lucky for me, I had a muslin bag sitting around to test the plan before buying in bulk (thanks Anthropologie)! The result was less than desirable.

The fix: find bags with a tighter weave so the design shows up better, and go easy and even on the ink. I considered switching to cotton bags, but that might lend itself to more bleeding, and I really think the bleeding here was from uneven inking.

2. Poms. Like many brides, I looked at the Martha Stewart instructions online for making poms and thought, ‘wow, that is so easy.’  I think I’ll make a hundred or two. I bought a bulk pack of tissue paper and started on my way. Folding went fine. Wiring the center, fine. Cutting the edges… err mangling the edges - not so great! I persevered with my mangled edges and wondered how they managed to cut a perfect semicircle edge off the ends in one piece. Then I started fluffing out the tissue. Riiiip. Apparently that requires a gentle hand! When I was finished fluffing, I felt like I only had half a pom. The 8 sheets were way to little to give the pom any life, which is why it’s sitting on a table top in this picture.

At the time I was trying to make the pom look so good, but you can sorta see how there aren’t enough sheets to fluff an entire ball. Here is a close up of the ends.

The fix: I’m now working with 10-12 sheets of tissue per pom, slowly, and I am rounding the edges individually. While the paper is still in accordion fold, I grab one of these folds and give it a snip to round the edges, then move onto the next accordion fold and snip. It’s slow going, but so far so good.

The pom on the left has less accordion folds than the one on the right. I used two tons of paper to add a little depth.

3. Edge painting. I saw this post by Miss Gloss and thought it was such a cute detail to spruce up our invitations! Of course, following her instructions would be too easy. Instead of working with a paint brush and paint, I decided to go with a raised stamp pad thinking this would minimize the mess. The problem was the pad didn’t deposit enough ink when swiped over a group of invites, so I had to pass each one over the stamp pad. Who knows why I didn’t do one set, stop, observe, and decide if it was really a good idea for my suite. I painted all the maps and RSVP cards, then decided it didn’t look that great together after all. Also, I smudged it all over the place.

I tried to redo the RSVP edges in silver (because the RSVP and map stacked one on top of the other, so the red on red was way too much). Sadly, the silver rubbed off. The really sad part - I realized this after redoing all the RSVP cards.

The fix: Unfortunately I ended up ordering new maps, and leaving the RSVPs as they were. It didn’t look so bad having them be the only element with colored edges, but that didn’t change the fact that our guests will get silver fingers after touching them! Sorry guests!

Hopefully my other projects will go a little better. If not, at least others can learn from my mistakes.

Did you have any DIY slip ups? Or projects you really wanted to try, but just thought you needed the skills of a Leonardo da Vinci to pull it off?