Weddingbee Blog

With an outdoor ceremony, it would be pretty pointless to try and do a unity candle, so we decided to go with the norm and do a sand ceremony. I picked out three vases during a sale at Michaels for our sand ceremony. I also picked up some crystals that were on sale to decorate the vases for a little personal touch.

I’m not the craftiest person, so I had no clue what the difference was between “hotfix” and “flat back” crystals. I later found out on the Knot’s DIY board that the hotfix will create a type of adhesive when heated. I attempted to heat them using the embossing gun, but I heated my fingers/tweezers more than the back of the crystal. It did heat up enough to stick, but it didn’t look like it would stay. Maybe it would have set after cooling and stuck? Well, I figured that super glue would do the trick, so I got to work super gluing tiny crystals in the shape of our initials onto the vases.

I made it through the “L” (the first letter of my first name) with blue crystals and almost all the way through the “C” (the first letter of Mr. E’s first name) before realizing that I would run out of green crystals. I was one (ONE) little crystal short!

So I headed back to Michaels to pick up another pack of crystals to finish the C. Since they come in packs of 42, I’ll have to find something else to do with the remaining 41, lol.

After hitting up Michaels once again, I combined the sand vases with the extra pomander I made and some blue and green marbles. Here you have our simple and cute sand-ceremony setup.

I like that the pomander adds a little more color and carries on the DIY floral theme from the aisle. All that we need is the green and blue sand! Finding that should be easy, right?

Wrong! I swear I made at least four stops to craft stores before I was about to give up. I started with my go-to, Michaels. They had some sand in the floral-accessory area, and I found a bright blue (a little brighter that I wanted) and a pale sage green (not as bright as I would have liked). I wasn’t sold, so I left it there and headed over to JoAnn, where I found a single bag of beige sand. I asked if they had more of a selection and was told, “Doubt it. It’s not really that popular.”

Hmmm…So I turned to the Internet and found the colors I wanted on the JoAnn website, but the shipping was twice as much as the cost of the bag…no thank you! I headed back to Michaels and picked up the blue…not happy, but I at least had one down.

Well, I happened to be in the area of Hobby Lobby, so I started looking around. I was about to give up since I could only find “moon sand” (which is mold-able—not what I wanted), and then there it was! Jars of sand, in the bright green and dark blue that I wanted! And it was only $1.99 per bottle. Not too shabby at all.

Are you doing a sand ceremony? Have you had to make several trips looking for a DIY material?