- Blog
- Bios
- Boards
- Classifieds
- DIY
- Gallery
- Vendor Reviews
- Shop Weddingbee
Weddingbee Blog
While I plan to buy all new Mason jars for drink vessels, I’ve been saving every pasta and pickle jar that comes through our kitchen for our DIY centerpieces and some other decor undertakings. I’ve noticed that many tutorials go ahead and assume you have a squeaky clean jar to start with, without explaining how you get the paper and glue off in the first place.
With the help of Mr. Dragon we’ve locked down a pretty easy method of prepping jars, which I’m going to share today!
Personal photos
The first step, after you’ve cleaned any remaining food/product out of the jars, is to soak them in hot, soapy water. Make sure you fill up the insides of the jars with water, too, because it helps soften the labels from the inside and outside.
PSA: The Milwaukee meetup planned for this Saturday 4/21 has changed location. We’re now meeting at Trocadero at noon. Anyone is welcome! But please RSVP on our thread because we need an exact count for the reservation. (I know, meetup fail.)
I finally finished all five paper-flower bouquets—four bridesmaids’ plus mine—and all the paper corsages using good ol’ Martha’s tutorial. Needless to say, I was beyond tired of making flowers. Alas, I still had the mothers’ and grandmothers’ corsages to make. Instead of wrestling with more floral tape, I decided to go back to a medium I feel a lot more comfortable with: fabric. This way, the corsages could be worn again in the future if our mothers and grandmothers wanted.
Image via Create and Delegate
I used the Fabric Lotus Flower tutorial from Create and Delegate, but instead of using georgette fabric or chiffon, I recycled a white sheet. I was going to use some tulle I had in my stash, too, but after I made the first two I got fed up with that, too, so only the two moms will have tulle in their corsages.
I began by cutting a long strip of fabric about three inches wide and several feet long. If you’re going to make corsages I would recommend making them more like two inches wide. Since my fabric was a little stiffer than what the tutorial used, my flowers stood out too straight when I pinned them on.
Okay hive, I have dragged this out long enough. As we rapidly approach the RSVP deadline, I think it is safe to say that our guests have seen the invitations (hopefully!) so the time has come to share them with you!
Without further ado, our invitations:
They are hand-illustrated by yours-truly with major editing help from Mr. Dalmatian and MOH K and major assembling help from Mama Dalmatian.
Read more…
After I received a quote from a florist that totaled over $350 for three bouquets, I decided that there had to be a cheaper way to do things. Now, I’m not big with DIY projects (my philosophy is that if it can’t be done while drinking a glass of wine, it’s not worth doing yourself), but bouquets don’t look that hard to make, so I decided to give it a try. Here’s how I did it!
Step 1: Buy supplies.
We bought white hydrangeas, green hypericum berries, and green trachelium at Whole Foods for a total of $22. We also purchased floral tape, straight pins, and ribbon from Michaels for about $10.
Step 2: Cut the stems.
Turns out that hydrangeas have really thick stems that cannot be conquered by ordinary scissors and need a chef’s knife. (Step 1.5 is to wash the raw-chicken residue off your cutting board from dinner last night.) If you have roses or really any flower with a more delicate stem, scissors or pruning shears will be just fine, but we had to pull out the big guns on this.
Featured on Weddingbee
Unique Wedding Favors
“Add a memorable touch to your wedding with unique favors that match your theme.”
When Mr. Hawk and I first got engaged, one of the first things I obsessed over was beautiful wedding signs. Direction signs, reserved signs, it really didn’t matter. I bookmarked an obscene amount of “Mr.” and ”Mrs.” as well as “Bride” and ”Groom” signs on Etsy. More recently, seeing the posts by fellow bees like Miss Mink and Miss Coyote did nothing to quell my obsession. But as our budget slowly rapidly started to dwindle away, I decided that it was a project I could definitely tackle on my own.
Materials:
First, I primed and painted the plaques and let them dry. (You may have seen this coming from my table numbers post!)
Then I printed off “Mr.” and “Mrs.” in dimensions to match the plaques. The font I chose was Freebooter Script. To make a transfer of the letters from the paper to the plaque, I started by shading the back of the “Mr.” and “Mrs.” printouts with pencil.
OK, so that’s a dramatic title, but my ampersand struggle didn’t end after I threw in the towel on wrapping it in yarn. I figured I’d buy some sparkle paint, slap on a few coats, and have a shiny, glittery ampersand to join together our initials, no sweat.
Personal photos
It was a little worse for wear after having layers of yarn pulled off of it, but I set it up on a spare piece of cardboard, foam brush in hand. I thought I could paint it silver with acrylic craft paint then layer on some silver glitter. If you look closely at the above photo you’ll realize, much as I did, that the silver paint was definitely not high coverage, even though the bottle said it was.
Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
“Bit by bit, putting it together.” Anyone else love Stephen Sondheim? Any musical theater nerds out there? No? Well I figured the lyrics were appropriate because bit by bit, we’re putting it together and getting things done! Mr. Castle and I have basically been spending all our free time crossing things off our to-do list. Here’s a couple projects we have recently completed!
Our “Here Comes the Bride” sign:
We have two adorable ring boys. They are MOH N’s sons. The older of the two will be carrying the traditional ring bearer pillow, the same one that was used in my parents’ wedding. We decided to create a “Here Comes the Bride” sign for the younger of the two. He’s three, so I’m hoping holding a sign will be somewhat exciting for him! To make the sign I took this “Bride” sign that is offered as a free download on weddingchicks.com and I added the “Here Comes the” at the top. Mr. Castle made it really fancy by adding the nice florist border and cutting it out with a razor blade. An X-Acto knife would have been better, but we couldn’t find one. The stick is just a paint stirrer from Home Depot that I painted green. I plan on tying some ribbon at the top of the stick when we get to California.
We also finished making and printing our wedding Mad-Libs. I thought it would be a fun activity for guests to fill out during cocktail hour. Unlike most of our paper projects, which were created by Mr. Castle, I actually did these! I took the words from a couple different ones I found online and made it myself in Microsoft Word. I hope our guests enjoy them!
When my giant roll of yellow felt arrived, I kind of hid it away in a closet for a while. The idea of making tent bunting was daunting enough that I was too scared to delve into it right away. Eventually, though, I figured I should get going on it or give up on the idea (and be stuck with yards and yards and yards of useless felt as a result).
I started out by trying to establish exactly how much bunting I’d need. We haven’t firmed up plans with the tent-rental company, but we’re likely going with a 20’ x 40’ Warner peak marquee. Not being able to see the tent in person, I did some online searching until I found an image depicting the measurements.
Image from Warner Shelter Services
I established that I wanted to run the bunting from the tent frame up to each peak, rather than running it from side to side. I made up a quick top-down view in Photoshop to help me fully understand what I needed to make:
With Earth Day around the corner, I got to thinking about some of my efforts to “green” our wedding. Some worked out well. Others didn’t. I’d like to share one aspect of our wedding that isn’t as green as we had hoped it would be: the decor.
I imagine I’m not alone in looking at pictures from other weddings and thinking that candlelight adds a beautiful quality to the scene. Early in my planning, I was especially drawn to mercury glass. I love it so much that my floral designers are using mercury-glass vessels in all of our table arrangements and aisle decorations. I can’t wait to see the beautiful result.
From Inspired by This / Photo by Joielala Photographie / Via Lover.ly
I thought I’d collect mercury-glass candle holders to extend the look to others parts of our venue. The hitch: Mercury glass, the real stuff, is expensive. We could spend hundreds of dollars on mercury glass and only amass a small collection of it. I briefly considered making my own using one of the many tutorials that are on the web, but a discussion with one of my florists changed my mind. She suggested that we use mercury-glass votives on the bridal-party table, but stick to clear on the rest because the clear glass would allow more light to bounce around the room.
I knew plenty of brides sold decorative items from their weddings in the Classifieds section of the ’Bee, so I started watching the listings for votives. I started doing the math in my head and decided that I wanted around 100 votives to put on tables and around the venue. The flicker of candles would be everywhere!
After I posted our invitations, I got some requests for more info on how I actually designed/printed them, so I thought I’d put together a little (or, actually, huge) tutorial post on what I did.
Be warned: this post is ridiculously long and image heavy, but I wanted to explain it thoroughly, because the program I used can be weird and confusing if you’re not familiar with it.
I used Adobe InDesign to create my templates for the invitations and RSVP cards, and the envelopes for both. InDesign is a program made specifically for designing items for print, because it allows you to align and arrange things in a precise and foolproof way. I have the full version, but you can download a free 30-day trial from Adobe’s website. The trial version has full use of all the features, so you won’t be limited in what you can do.
InDesign uses a lot of jargon and all the screens look very “busy,” especially if you’re not used to Adobe interfaces. But, seriously, don’t be intimidated. I’ll tell you exactly what to do in this tutorial, and you can ignore everything else. And if you do click on something that messes you up, you can always use the “undo” button. Have no fear.
Picas
InDesign measures things in picas. A pica is one sixth of an inch. When you open InDesign, you’ll see things like “51p0″ and “66p0″—don’t be scared. That’s pica notation. Thankfully, you don’t have to learn picas/pica notation, because InDesign will kindly let you type your measurements in inches and convert it to picas for you, so all you have to worry about is inches. I’ll explain more on this later.
Guess what the Unicycles did last weekend? Celebrated Easter? Well, yes. Ate lots of candy? That too. We also did a bit of this:
Cue 2001: A Space Odyssey theme. Seriously, play the song while you read this post. It really adds a little something extra.
We tried to go inside and hand them to an actual post office worker, but it was closed. I’m not sure why we thought we had to hand them to someone anyway. I think I’ve just seen bees do that before and thought it was necessary? But really, tossing them into a mailbox works like a charm.
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!
Hand-Drawn Save the Dates by FutureFoxWife
Since I entered into the world of wedding blogs I’ve seen countless variations on one photo:
Image & product from La Cintre Boutique on Etsy / Photo by Cynthia Rose Photography
Since our wedding is in the summer, a popular time for weddings and travel, I knew we needed to send out save the dates. I didn’t want to spend tons and tons of money on S.T.D.’s so we decided to go the postcard route. I figured postcards would be easy to make and light on postage costs.
I decided all of this in September and I know save the dates should be sent out around/before the six month mark, but I waited until exactly 5 1/2 months before our wedding to do anything about my decision. Commence frantic scurry to get the save the dates designed, printed, addressed, and sent out. Mr. Scepter and I wanted to use our favorite engagement photo and then layer text on top of it. Unfortunately our design/Photoshop skills are very limited, and after a few attempts this is the best we could come up with:
Fail. Luckily, working at an advertising agency has its perks. After I showed my friend/co-worker, Shalanna, our failed attempt she graciously offered to make us a save the date and I all had to do was buy her a coke. Needless to say, Shalanna did an awesome job:
Read more…
Ahhh, Ryan Gosling. Everyone’s favorite man ever. I’m a little sick of all the “Hey Girl”s I’ve been seeing on Pinterest all year, but as a Ryan Gosling fan since the early The Notebook days (I even made Mr. Unicycle suffer through Half Nelson and Lars and the Real Girl with me, which I admit he deserves a cookie for) I can’t help but love them. Especially now that I’ve discovered wedding-themed ones!
Image via Practical Ryan Gosling
The Tumblr I found is run by A Practical Wedding and features the Goz saying all sorts of calming things about weddings. Usually my man Ryan says sweet things that put real boyfriends/fiances to shame, like this:
| Visit our sister sites | eHarmony Online Dating |
eHarmony Advice Dating Advice |
Project Wedding Wedding Songs |
JustMommies Pregnancy Calendar |
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 29 | 30 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |
