Weddingbee Blog

Originally published on August 23, 2010

Mrs. Cola nominated Mrs. Pin Cushion’s faux-to booth tutorial for the Helpful Series! Mrs. Cola says, “I’ve forwarded Pin Cushion’s PVC Faux-to Booth tutorial to several brides: I love how she breaks it down into an easy, manageable DIY, with something like PVC, which not everyone has worked with before. I really wish she’d posted this a few months earlier, because I like it so much more than the setup we used at our own wedding, with garment racks!”

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Oh, I wanted one.

I wanted one like Aladdin wants Jasmine, like a marathoner wants a gallon of Gatorade and like Hugh Grant wants to make another romantic comedy.

Pre-wedding, I knew, in my heart of hearts, that I wanted a photo booth. But my heart of hearts was also telling me we couldn’t spend a grand on a photo-strip spitting, old fashioned booth. And my heart of hearts wasn’t crazy enough to spend $464 from an online store ($97 for the backdrop, $367 for the support system [yikes!]) to build my own.

So, my (cheap, rational) heart of hearts led me to Home Depot to create a stand for our DIY faux-to booth backdrop. I had searched online for tutorials, but could only find extremely complicated versions involving power tools (and I preferred to keep all of my phalanges attached). Thus, we developed our own method which 1) ended up working out quite well 2) was cheap and 3) was easy to build.

For those wishing to build there own cheap, easy, fun photo booth, here is what we used:

(A) 2 of these (PVC pipe “elbows”)

(from Home Depot)

(B) 4 of these (PVC pipe caps)

(from Home Depot)

(C) 4 of these (PVC pipe “T pieces”)

(from Home Depot)

(D) 4 of these (really long PVC pipes)

(from Home Depot)

(E) Some fabric (we bought 2 yards of fabric from IKEA [IKEA’s fabric is great because it’s extra wide; 59" instead of a typical bolt of fabric which is 44"]).

(from IKEA)

Once we had all of components together, we put it together in less than an hour in our backyard. We used a PVC pipe cutter that my dad already owned, like the one below (but you could probably just use gardening shears, or a butter knife [though the latter might take a bit longer . . .]).

(from here)

To help explain how we put it together, Mr. Pin Cushion whipped some files up in Illustrator.

On the left, you can see the backdrop stand all put together.

And on the right, is the “exploded” version, to see all of the individual components (the PVC elbows, the caps on the bottom, etc).

You can cut the PVC pipe however long you want, to make the stand as wide and as tall as you need (do remember when cutting it, that the t-pieces and elbow pieces will each add a few inches, so take that into account).

Then just snap the pieces into place, attach your fabric (we used clear packing tape) and stand back and admire your handy work.

Up next, I’ll show you a some fab shots we got with our photo booth. Here’s one gem for you:

Chip chip cheerio! What dignified guests we have at our wedding!

Are you planning to have a photo booth at your shindig? Are you renting, buying or building?

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Catch up on Weddingbee’s “Helpful Posts” Series!