Weddingbee Blog

When we first started the wedding planning process, I didn’t even know what DIY stood for. After lurking on The Knot’s boards for a while, I found the DIY boards and learned how many ways you could save money by making stuff yourself. The added benefit, other than the savings, is that these little projects make the wedding more personal.

So I did a little research and decided our first DIY projects would be the monogram and the save-the-date magnets. I’ve always loved putting up friends’ save-the-date magnets or cards on our fridge and got excited thinking that people would be putting ours up on their respective fridges! I should probably mention that Mr. E comes from a very creative family. Mr. E’s mom was so wonderful to take my old college shirts and make them into this keepsake masterpiece below. I absolutely love it, and what better way to keep my memories from college since I no longer wear t-shirts on a regular basis (yay, corporate America)?

Not only is Mr. E a lot more creative than I am, he’s also a wiz at the computer (has one computer degree and is currently working on another one). So I was more than happy to put these two projects in his hands. We decided from the beginning that our wedding colors would be blue and green since those are our favorite colors, so Mr. E went to work on the monogram. After a couple examples and input from our families, we finally decided on this one:

For some of our future projects we’re going to add a border around the monogram so it’s easier to cut out (you’ll see what I mean later). I was so excited to have this first piece of our wedding complete!

Next up was the save-the-date magnet. While reading other Knotties (girls on The Knot’s website/boards), I learned of this amazing little machine called the Xyron 500. This machine will take whatever you put through it (up to five inches) and make it into a magnet or sticker, or laminate it. Daddy Elephant was generous enough to pay for the machine, so we headed to Michaels and used a 40% off coupon to purchase it (gotta love coupons!). Mr. E designed the magnet layout in Illustrator to tie in the travel theme we’ll have at the reception. Again, this was another trial-and-error process to come up with the design and wording that we wanted, but we loved the finished product. For the example, we printed on normal copy paper, but we’ll use a type of card stock when we do the real thing. Once printed off, we simply run it through the Xyron machine with the magnet cartridge, and out pops a laminated magnet!

We’ll be designing a card to send the magnets in that will have our hotel information and our wedding website. More on that once we finalize a design. All in all, I’m very happy with our first DIY projects and can’t wait to tackle some more during this planning process.

Did you incorporate any DIY projects into your planning?