Weddingbee Blog

Man, I’ve been busting out the DIY projects like a woman possessed lately! I guess this is what happens as the wedding gets closer—all the crafts we’ve been planning on doing actually have to get done. The benefit to my crafting bonanza is that I feel incredibly productive. The downside is that all the wedding stuff is literally taking over our 400 square foot studio.

(Personal Photo)

I can barely walk without stubbing my toe on a random box. Ah, how we suffer for the sake of the love (and the wedding!).

Anyways, this minor project involves Old Navy flip flops and a hot glue gun.

Yup, I bit the bullet and ordered about 30 pairs of blue and yellow flip flops when they were on sale for $2.50/pair. It’s a decent price for the sandals—I’d been looking for a while online but couldn’t come up with anything cheaper and I think offering guests the option of changing out of their high heels in exchange for comfy flip flops is worth the cost.

I decided on 30 pairs based on the fact that if we are expecting 175 guests, and about 50% or 87, will be female. Out of those female guests, about half are my parents’ generation or older, who probably would not want to wear the flip flops, bringing me down to about 45 or so guests who potentially would want to use them. I chose to go with an under-estimate purely for cost reasons, but hopefully 30 pairs will be enough.

Once the flip flops arrived on my doorstep, (can I just give a shout-out to my UPS delivery guy? Not only are we on a first name basis since I get so many things delivered, but he carries them up four flights of stairs to drop everything off at my door. Thank you, thank you, kind UPS man, for not leaving the packages on the stoop!) I needed a cute way to display them.

I’ve found that TJ Maxx is a great source for cheap baskets. I picked this one up for $8.99:

(Personal Photo)

Cute and functional—perfecto! But of course I wanted to jazz it up a bit. I grabbed my hot glue gun and some yellow ribbon, adding a border around the outside of the basket so it looked like this:

(Personal Photo)

I then added a little sign that says “Kick off your shoes and dance the night away”, which I printed out on some leftover blue cardstock and bordered with white. You know I couldn’t resist throwing in a paper flower or two for decoration, so the end result looked like this:

(Personal Photo)

And finally, I took all the flip flops out of their individual plastic bags, arranged them nicely, and shoved and mangled them in order to fit them all into the basket.

(Personal Photo)

(Personal Photo)

It feels good to check another project off the list, even if this was an easy one. My only concern is that people won’t put them to good use, which would be a bummer.

Have you ever been to a wedding where there were flip flops for the taking? Did you use ’em??