Weddingbee Blog

You bet I just referenced today’s blog post with HP nerd-ness.

I promised after showing you all of my DIY-failures that I had one project which I attempted and finished off successfully—so let’s celebrate the small victories, people!

So, I made ribbon wands. The inspiration from this came from a blog I discovered in 2009—he first I’d seen using grey & green together. I loved them so much that I ended up using them, along with white/ivory, as our own wedding colours.

Since our church has the pretty standard rules of ‘no flowers, no throwing stuff, no mess’ for the procession, we were left with…bubbles. I’m not a fan of bubbles. Making the ribbons was totally meant to be. I won’t go into a huge tutorial since they’re basically the easiest thing in the world to whip up, even for the DIY-challenged like myself, but I will show you a few pictures of the process.

We started off with 30cm wooden dowel rods, a hot glue gun with extra sticks, and lots and lots of ribbon. (It’s not all pictured here!)

Since I was trying to keep costs down, I decided I wanted each wand to have around 30cm of free-flowing ribbon. To allow a little extra for the wrapping/gluing of each wand, I cut each ribbon strand into 36cm lengths. That took a little time, though paired with a few Gilmore Girl reruns, wasn’t too bad at all.

The actual assembling part was pretty simple: I just did three small dabs of glue along the top of the rod, quickly attached the ribbon and then wound all three strips around until they completely covered the wood. Then I secured them with a little extra glue and held them tight until it was secure.

Working with the hot glue gun made things quick and easy, but it also made a bit of a mess. There were stringy bits of glue going everywhere, and I definitely recommend doing the project somewhere with some protection. Or, if you happen to create your own ribbon wands while parked out on the sofa watching Gilmore Girls like I was, at least put some cardboard down to catch all of the droopy glue-bits and stringy deluge.

Several ribbon shortages, some finger burns and a whole season of television later, I’d finished all 120 wands. I did a mixture of the grey, green and ivory so that when they’re handed out to guests at the church, they should be pretty well-scattered, but we’ll see how that works out later on. I think they look fabulous!

I do have some little tips for anyone who might be wanting to do wands in the future: firstly, choose a thick ribbon. I chose a thinner option (6mm) because it was the only one available that had enough of the colours I wanted, but wow, did I regret it. (I ended up having to use three strands per wand, which meant I had to purchase quite a lot of ribbon.) And if you’re not sure how much ribbon you’ll need, pick out an amount and then at least double it. I had to make three separate trips back to the craft store to get more, and thankfully they still had plenty of my colours left! If you’re buying it by the metre, it means you’ll be stuck with it – but two of my three shades came in pre-cut rolls, which could be returned. Just check with your local store first!

As for the price, here’s what I paid to make 120 wands (in Aussie dollars):

Dowel rods – $5/pack of 10 – Total price: $60
Hot Glue Gun – free, sticks $4 – Total price: $4
Ribbon – $1 per 4m roll – Total price: $40

Grand Total: Just over $100.

It may not seem cheap, but that total price wasn’t a great deal different to purchasing individual bubbles or confetti-stick-flickers. And they’re pretty, so there’s always that. To be honest, you can probably get the wooden rods a lot cheaper if you have a lot of options—but I couldn’t find the pre-cut ones anywhere other than one large craft-chain, so I paid the price. Seeing those babies fluttering in the breeze is going to be SO worth the money (and the hot glue burns!)

What was your most successful wedding project?