One of my rationales for having an insanely long engagement was the idea that I could do many DIY projects and not be rushing to do them at the last minute.
I didn’t really take into account that I am a bit of a procrastinator and thus would still leave projects to do at the last minute anyways, but oh well, live and learn. It seems like I’m not the only one with this problem!
Here are a couple of projects that I’ve put together recently. I wanted to share them with you guys since I’m really proud of how they turned out, but they really aren’t big enough for their own post, so random projects in a row!
1) Thank you banner. Pbear thinks making a gigantic prop for one picture for our thank you cards is silly, but I kind of like it.
I have no idea why the peach photographs so orangey. *sigh*
It’s hard to tell from afar, but the letters have this gorgeous watercolor look to them.
I decided to give you a break from looking at my face for a while (after I inundated you with my engagement photos). Instead, I’ll talk to you about shoes again!
I mentioned previously that I was thinking about creating a pair of hand-painted Toms. I was a bit nervous about doing it myself because Toms are not exactly the least expensive shoe around.
I took some time to think about what I was hoping for and to sketch it out.
I traced the shoe and sketched what the top looks like.
I went with a Moroccan pattern because I thought it was simple but fun. I found the pattern through a Google image search, printed it on card stock, and cut out the pattern to make a stencil.
Once I was happy with how it looked on paper, I used a pencil and traced the pattern onto the shoe using my stencil.
A long time ago, when I had time for Pinterest, I pinned the following photo onto my wedding board with the caption, “Love this look for wedding nails!”
Image via Nature Nails by Tenshi no Hana
When full-nail applique kits started becoming popular, I looked for the lacy look I had pinned and couldn’t get out of my mind. Imagine my excitement when Essie introduced their new line of Sleek Stick Nail Appliques, one of which was aptly titled “Embrace the Lace”!
The escort cards are coming along nicely. I’ve so far managed to get hold of 55 out of 81 photos. Which is pretty good, I think!
A lot of them were family, so it just meant going through photo albums, but I’ve also managed to score some absolutely hilarious ones of family friends. This is going to be so much fun.
So I’ve done a bit of a “practice run.”
I wanted the photos to look “old,” so if I came across a photo that looked too new, I used Picfull to do a bit of online “Instagram’ing.” God bless the hipsters and the demand for “retro” and “vintage” these days.
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All photos personal
Once the images all looked “aged,” I inserted them in Word (because I’m not a fancy-pants designer) and spaced them out so they would all have a border. I aimed to make them look like a polaroid and made the bottom border a little bigger.
Next, I wrote in the names. I decided to use Courier New as the font for a “typewriter” kind of feel, and printed them out!
Recently, you may have thought, “Gosh, that Blue Whale has been awfully emotional lately. Can we see some pretty pictures or something?”
I have been a bit stressed. I can’t lie. But I managed to fit in just a couple more DIY projects at the last minute, so I’ve got some pretty picture for you! Hopefully I’ll find some time to snap pictures of the others, but my favorite project by far has been my painted shoes.
This is a project I’ve been thinking about since we first got engaged! I can’t believe I saved it right up until the last minute. So how did go down?
Check out these great projects hive members have uploaded to Weddingbee’s DIY section! Click on the title of each project for tutorials.
If your project is featured in DIY Friday, you’re eligible for a special Weddingbee badge for your blog or website! See instructions on how to grab the badge here!
The title of this post may be a tad misleading—while I 100% DIY’ed the guest welcome bags, I got the weekend itineraries printed through an awesome vendor on Etsy (more on that later).
For the bags, I wanted to provide travel-weary guests with a selection of sweet snacks, salty snacks, gum, Advil, and bottled water. To save on costs, couples will be getting one bag each (but extra goodies inside to share). Originally I was going to order all the snacks through Minimus, a great site to order mini versions of all kinds of snacks. That was until I was shopping at BJ’s one day and realized I could get all the economy-sized snacks I needed there—the prices were cheaper and I wouldn’t have to pay for shipping.
With that in mind, here is a list of my welcome bag purchases (and their prices) below.
All photos are personal.
Grand total: $161.90
Disclaimer: I wish I made up the name “Oh Shit Kit” but alas, I saw it on Offbeat Bride while looking for inspo for my bridal emergency kit. It’s just way more fun to say than “bridal emergency kit.”
As I’ve mentioned many times here, I’m the furthest from a DIY’er as you can be. However, this week I have a number of projects I’m working on that I consider to be DIY (not in an arts-and-crafts kind of way but more in a gather-random-things-and-put-them-in-bags kind of way). So to start off, I wanted to share my first project that was super simple and very necessary in case of wedding-day beauty emergencies. Hence, the Oh Shit Kit in two simple steps.
Step One: get a one-gallon Ziploc bag to hold all your items.
Step Two: Jam all the items Place the items below into said Ziploc bag in an orderly fashion. That’s it!
Here’s a breakdown of what’s included in my kit—about 90% of the items were things I already had around the house so I’m giving myself points for saving some dough.
All photos are personal.
As you might have guessed already, I love good stationery and other paper goods. I think a good quarter of my posts have had something to do with paper.
Thus, it is probably no surprise that I sent out rehearsal dinner invitations a few days back.
Our wedding rehearsal and rehearsal dinner are in two different locations/towns, and we are also scheduled for them to be three hours apart. This time gap was due to the time block in which our venue would let us get into the space. I’m not too concerned about having the gap, just that people are aware of the gap. We are after all close to Boston Commons and other historic Boston landmarks. I’m sure people can keep busy as long as they are aware of the gap.
Thus, the need for an invitation that explained the logistics of the situation. I found very few invitations that seemed to address the rehearsal itself, and so I thought I would put something together myself.
Check out these great projects hive members have uploaded to Weddingbee’s DIY section! Click on the title of each project for tutorials.
If your project is featured in DIY Friday, you’re eligible for a special Weddingbee badge for your blog or website! See instructions on how to grab the badge here!
For those of you following along at home, you’ll note that we’re having a fairly long engagement (600-plus days, in fact). While this has been great for giving us plenty of time to plan, it also means that we have time to find things we like, buy them, and then decide we don’t like them anymore. (We’ve had something like that happen with our invitations, but that’s a story for another time.)
One of the things that has been the hardest is that I have all of these fun wedding-related things that I want to do but need to space them out to make sure I *really* want to do them. (Also, you know, to make sure I have time to do my homework and study, and blah blah blah.) The craft I’m going to share with you today was something that I knew I wanted from the second I first saw it.
Meet the wine cork letters:
From Miss Fairy
Sparky and I really love to drink wine. It’s something we’ve done together for as long as we’ve been dating and even before that from when we were friends. Incorporating something like this into our wedding seemed only natural.
Well, we are only a few days away from the big day! The last five days have been absolutely crazy as my mom, sister, and I have worked our tushes off to finalize everything. Our vendors have their final payments, we have a priest (and a deacon!), Mr. S just took his last exam of the semester, and we are just so ready to be married!
Our family and friends started to arrive in town and it has been so nice to sit back and relax with our family’s signature drink: the blueberry muffin (blueberry vodka and Crystal Light lemonade). I am so relieved to have all the stress and hard work behind us and all the fun to look forward to this week. It has been a long, exciting, and often draining process, but I wanted to share one last project with you before the big day.
As I mentioned earlier, our dance floor is essentially a large covered veranda that is completely surrounded by a concrete bench. My wonderful aunt is helping sew 24 pillows to spread around the benches. These pillows are natural colors—brown, moss green, and tan. I wanted to top these off with some personalized pillows that had our new last name and cheesy hearts. I swear this is the only burlap I snuck into the wedding! (It is hard to resist sometimes.)
These pillows were made completely from scratch. I bought a few yards of burlap at the fabric store. I laid the throw pillows from my couch on top of the fabric and basically just cut around them. I didn’t measure, but just winged it. I then printed out the various letters and words on my home printer. Again, I used various sized letters depending on how big the pillow was. I then used black paint to paint directly on the burlap.
Inside our OOT bags, we knew we wanted to include a packet with helpful information. Our guests won’t have any locals to point them in the right direction. Also, Mr. Squirrel and I have a number of other activities planned for our guests to make the whole weekend a party! This packet was a way to get them all of the information the guests need: locations, times, directions, and contact numbers.
I know OOT bags can quickly become expensive as you start buying in bulk. For those who can’t swing the whole bag, I highly encourage you to at least make a welcome packet that can be passed out to your guests when they arrive. Printing is the only real cost. Heck, print it at home in black and white and call it a day.
The tedious part of these is gathering all the information. Thankfully, MOH K is truly an angel and she spent a ton of time compiling the information and designing it into this cute booklet. Honestly, this is a great task to pass off to a local bridesmaid! (Feels good to delegate!)
Our book opened with a welcome message to our guests. Of course it had to fit the sun theme! We had some fun with fonts and included a table of contents. When designing the layout, we filled in empty space with fun facts like pointing guests to where we got engaged (so they can walk there and check it out!).
Next is the ever important contact information. I did not want guests calling us, so I gave them plenty of options. 
We included a large group with people from both families and both sides of the bridal party so everyone would have a direct contact and it would limit the phone tag. We also used this page to communicate important information about transportation to the venue. In our case, the means the water taxi!
Our invitations were definitely a labor of love. Thankfully, I learned the basic ropes of Adobe Illustrator when I sat down to create our save-the-dates earlier this year. This meant that the invitation process went much more quickly and smoothly than the save-the-date creation process. What took me a long time was finally settling on a color scheme and design. There are so many choices and it can feel overwhelming at times. At the end of the day, I simply needed to sit down, pick a design and walk away from it—and that’s just what I did. I’m incredibly happy with the way that they turned out. Here is how it appeared to our guests upon opening the envelope:
Poor Mr. C punched out all of those belly bands using a Martha Stewart punch one morning while I was sleeping in. He popped in The Hobbit DVD and went to town. By the time I woke up he had 100 beautiful belly bands neatly stacked into piles. He was also a huge help in the assembly process, as we ended up mailing off around 80 of these invites to our nearest and dearest.
When you’re engaged, you have a lot of reasons to send thank you notes. I’ve been to celebratory happy hours and engagement parties, and I still have bridal showers and all that other fun stuff on the horizon. It took me a few months to get my stride and figure out exactly what I wanted, but I finally came up with a thank-you-note system that no one else has.
For my first major DIY project I made our thank you notes from scratch. I didn’t set out wanting to do this, but after sorting through too many options that weren’t right for us, the thought came to me that I could just do this myself. Although it took me a bit of time, it wasn’t anything I needed special skills to complete. I plan on using this technique in the future, and I hope this tutorial is helpful for people who want to do something similar.
The supplies needed are:
