Weddingbee Blog

Specifically, the yards upon yards of which I bought for ceremony decor. Mrs. Bunting helped solved my assembly issues by directing me towards welt cord, the stuff used for piping around furniture or pillows. I was able to get 30 feet, more than enough to span the distance between branches. At less than $4, I won’t feel bad chopping a bunch of off when it doubles as a backdrop for our DIY photo booth, which will hopefully look a little something like this:

image via My Sweet and Saucy

But without the ability to attach it to a wall or door frame I had to come up with an alternative.

Believe it or not, all that ribbon is HEAVY. I needed to make something pretty sturdy that wouldn’t buckle under the weight or tension. It also needed to be fairly tall enough to allow our statuesque guests to take part without having to scrunch down to get in the shot. Oh, and it had to be easily assembled/disassembled as we had to be able to transport it.

What did I come up with? After a trip to a nationwide home improvement store and a little DIY magic I had two of the following:

A 2ft piece of 2” diameter PVC cemented into a plastic urn as well as two 6’ long 1 3/8 diameter wood drapery rods (not pictured). I filled the pot with a little cement before inserting the PVC pipe to help make it a little more secure and to give me a few extra inches of height. While functional, it’s not that pretty. Nothing a few bags of 16×18” moss couldn’t fix.

I started by hot gluing one edge to the PVC then worked my way around the entire pipe. You might run across a few bare spots on the mat, don’t worry about it as you can touch it up later with some of the little pieces that end up EVERYWHERE.

The next step was making a circular piece to cover the cement at the bottom. I made a rough template out of the tissue paper that came inside moss (waste not want not!) with the outer diameter slightly larger than the opening of the pot. Trace your template on the back and cut it out. Don’t forget to make a slit so that you can easily wrap it around the base.

Since the diameter is slightly larger it creates just enough tension to hold it in place without the need for glue.

Screw one of these to the top of each rod and you’re all set.

65lb crown bolt via Home Depot

I literally just finished this so I haven’t had a chance to test it out with the ribbon curtain but I’m pretty sure it’ll hold. Like a lot of projects this was a venture into uncharted territory.

Have you ever made something on the fly without instructions? What was it and how did it turn out?