Planning a wedding on a budget, or just love to get creative and do-it-yourself? There are endless ways you can bring your imagination into play to get creative with your wedding, and endless benefits too! You can get a more personal look and feel as well as more unique results when you DIY, and you can also get more involved in planning, which is a fun process all in itself, and something else to remember. And who knows—the ideas you showcase online with your wedding photos afterwards could inspire others! Here is a roundup of some of our favorite DIY wedding tips from creative experts!1. Use chalkboard paint
Chalkboard paint is all the rage these days! You can use it to coat any surface you can think of, and once it dries, you can write on it with chalk and erase it as many times as you want, just like an actual chalkboard. Chalkboard paint is cheap and easy to use, and it has a really whimsical look. Carrie Waller at Dream Green DIY had an ornate old frame with a destroyed painting in it gifted to her by a friend. In parts 1 and 2, discover how she transforms it from trash to treasure, and eventually turns it into a beautiful menu at her catering table! Not only is this a great idea for displaying a menu, but you could also use chalkboard paint to create signs telling people how to get to your wedding at the venue, to label seats, and more! What a cool idea!
2. Use flowers in creative, unexpected ways
Just look at this beautiful floral bicycle over on Style Me Pretty (a great website for hundreds of amazing DIY wedding flowers & ideas!). This is a really easy DIY project with an incredibly beautiful result. Sometimes out-of-the-box thinking with flowers has some incredible results. You can use flowers at your wedding for so much more than just centerpieces and bouquets!
3. Head out to nature
Don’t have the budget to get married in a fancy wedding venue with a beautiful garden, but fancy an unforgettable outdoor wedding? Why not get married in nature? That’s what Aleah and Zach decided to do when they shared their wedding with Offbeat Bride. They decided to get married in the mountains in Colorado. “It’s cheaper,” Aleah writes, “it’s colder (but not terrible, and it’s beautiful.” And it is; the photographs (by Kelly Sarah Photography, and Blue Skies Inn, who took the one shown above) came out absolutely beautifully, full of color and dappled light. You’ll notice that like Carrie Waller suggests in #6 below, they also decided to go with a variety of colors for their wedding flowers instead of just a few. This works very nicely with the forest environment, and really helps to make the wedding décor stand out against the green and brown of the backdrop.
4. DIY photo booths
You may know Lauren Conrad best from “Laguna Beach” and “The Hills” on MTV, but she’s also a skilled designer with her own design blog. One great idea that Lauren shares for DIY weddings is DIY photo booths! “No matter what backdrop you choose, setting up a DIY photo booth is a lot easier than you think. If you don’t have a photographer to man it, you can simply set up a tripod with a Polaroid or digital camera on a timer.” These photos are very shareable too; they are a lot of fun to upload to Facebook the next day! What a fun way to capture wedding memories in style.
5. Arrange your own wedding flowers
This idea comes from the Creature Comforts blog. Ez Pudewa decided that rather than simply buy a wedding bouquet from the store for her sister’s wedding, she would instead try her hand at crafting one herself. She did head to the florist in order to buy the blooms, and writes, “The versions I came up with were limited by what was available in stores (since I was only practicing and didn’t want to spend too much money hunting down specific blooms). Still, she had no problem matching her sister’s wedding colors and coming up with some gorgeous, professional-looking designs.
Also of interest, Ms. Pudewa writes, “We recently decided to shift the theme to include some soft peachy colors for a day that has more of a relaxed ‘walk in the garden’ feeling about it.” So here we have yet another example of how flowers can inspire the rest of your wedding décor!
6. Don’t worry about wedding colors
Another great tip from Carrie Waller concerns wedding colors and flowers. “Instead of constricting ourselves to official ‘wedding colors,’ we let the in-season colorful blooms do all the talking,” she writes. “In order to keep the variety of colors going, friends and family helped me make dozens of handmade paper medallions from scrapbook paper, dowel rods and oversized buttons.”
It’s a beautiful effect. When you confine yourself to specific colors for weddings, you can get a nice cohesive look and feel, but you also can end up limiting yourself. Flowers are often at their best when you have a rich variety of colors. If you start with that cornucopia of colors and design the rest of your wedding around it, you can have a fun, vivid result.
7. Etch champagne flutes
If you’re looking for a great book resource for planning a wedding on a budget, The Broke-Ass Bride’s Wedding Guide by Dana LaRue is a great source. Dana also runs a website where she posts more great wedding tips, including DIY projects like these etched champagne flutes. You might think something like custom-etched champagne flutes would be expensive or difficult to make, but they aren’t—they are surprisingly easy, and have an amazing effect!
We hope you enjoyed this roundup of creative DIY wedding inspiration from real brides and wedding décor experts! As you can see, there really are no limits to the beautiful effects you can achieve on a low budget when you use your imagination and are willing to try something a little different. Have fun, and be sure to share your own DIY wedding inspiration with us in the comments!
(source for photo booth image)
