As Promised, the Bride's How-To's

Our bride Jen, from yesterday's featured wedding, was kind enough to share some of her planning secrets and how-to's of her extremely gorgeous, and totally DIY wedding.  Enjoy!

 

Christian and I approached our wedding as if it was the best party we were ever going to throw. In light of that, we really wanted the day to be an expression of who we are and what we like. We picked the location, the band, the caterer and our photographers right away. We took our time with the other details. My first priority was cost, paying for the wedding ourselves we needed to try and keep within our budget. My second priority was making things look cohesive. Mostly, things just had a way of growing.

Teacups: We spent two years at tag sales and antique fairs (as did our friends and family) hunting for antique teacups for the favors. My mother-in-law and her sister spent the weeks leading up to the wedding planting each cup with ivy (a favorite of Christian and mine). They watched each cup the day of the wedding and added ferns and other greens before adding the wooden herb tag with each guest name and placing at the table.

 

Champagne: We have often noticed at weddings that champagne toasts are expensive and underwhelming, often warm and not very good. So we tried over a dozen bottles of champagne from $10-$15 a bottle. We picked Yellow for $12 for its great flavor. We then purchased small galvanized oval buckets, wrapped each one with brown napkins (bought off ebay for $1 a piece), filled with ice and places two bottles of champagne in each. This way, all of our guests had plenty of COLD champagne. It also added to our overall table setting. It was a HUGE hit!

 

Flip flops: A co-worker of mine told me about a wedding she went to that had a small basket of flip flips in the ladies room for "dancing feet." I LOVED the idea. At the end of last summer I purchased 80 pairs of flip flops from Old Navy for $1 each (40 brown/40 pink) in a variety of sizes and stored them in our attic for the year. We bought large galvanized buckets, tied brown and pink ribbon around them, tied a pair of pink scissors to the handle (to cut the flip flop apart), filled the buckets with flip flops and put them on either side of the dance floor. I am happy to say that at the end of the day, I only had 2 extra pairs left over! Guests (male and female LOVED them!)

 

Programs:After seeing Kate & Lara's beautiful engagement photos, I asked my maid-of-honor to design a program with one of the pictures. Christian printed them all out on photo paper at our house and two of my bridesmaid's mounted them to pastel cardstock the day before the wedding.

 

Mailbox: The mailbox for cards was an idea that Christian's aunt Lorraine came up with. I was struggling to find a vessel to put cards in that would be unique, attractive and functional. She came up with the mailbox idea, a bridesmaid spraypainted it pink and wrote our name on it. It was a great conversation piece and we got lots of compliments about the idea.

 

Lanterns: I had seen a picture of a tent lit by hundreds of paper lanterns. I sent the website to Christian and he was pretty confident he and one of his best men could build it. And build it they did - Christian, his uncle and many of his groomsmen built, electrified and hung 100 paper lanterns in varying sizes. They were gorgeous once the sun went down!

 

The Tavern: in order to maximize space in the tent, we set up a small easyup 10 feet from the tent for the bar, which we labeled "the tavern." When we met with the rental company about linens, the large tent and dishes, we were originally planning to rent a bar. The woman we were working with told us they had row boat that they use for rawbars. We had the great idea to use it as a cooler and fill it with beer and wine. It was perfect! Guests loved it and so did we. We then filled a canoe with us and put non-alcoholic beverages in the canoe (an idea from our caterer). Our young guests really loved this idea and had fun going to get their own sodas/waters/juices.

 

Thank you so much for sharing, Jen!  Congratulations to you and Christian!!

 

Comments

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Love this post! Love this wedding! Thank you so much for sharing. I seriously adore every single detail....

[miss shortcake]

what a scrumptious wedding! The teacup arrangements are adorable!

[Lynn]

I love the flip flops, especially since they were quite a trademark of mine in college. How many guests were at this wedding if 80 pairs were bought? I'm trying to determine how many we would need if we were to do something like this!