Wedding Thursday- DIY Centerpieces

Today I have more beautiful centerpiece ideas to share with you. These were compliments of my best friend’s wedding. Anna and Kyle had a beautiful wedding. They had an absolutely gorgeous venue and worked very hard in planning their wedding and creating lots of DIY decorations. Their wedding was proof you can have a gorgeous wedding on a small budget. The centerpieces were so cute and a great idea by Anna. They were very easy to make, all of the bridesmaids sat down and whipped them out in a couple hours.

Supplies Needed:
-Mason Jars
-Twine
-Old Books
-Candles
-Cardboard
-Chalkboard Paint
-Chalk
-Flowers (we used silk flowers)
-And the obvious, scissors, hole punch

So what we did was to first stack two books on top of each other and wrapped them in twine. At the end of the twine we hole punched and added the tags for table #’s and reserved seating. The tags were made with cut out pieces of cardboard, spray the cardboard with chalkboard paint and then write on it with chalk.

In some of the centerpieces we used mason jars with a candle inside. We wrapped twine around the top of the mason jar and then placed the jar on top of the books and there you have it, an easy and inexpensive centerpiece.

Another one of the centerpieces had silk flowers stuck under the twine rather than having the mason jars. That way not every table was the same.

The tables that were not reserved for family were given numbers. There was no assigned seating at this wedding but numbers were needed for people to be called to the buffet table.

So now you have some easy, inexpensive and DIY centerpieces. The old books came from Anna’s mom who is a librarian and the mason jars were collected from different people who had them. That is proof that if you ask around you can find things you need and save a lot of money!

Do any of you have any inexpensive, DIY centerpieces you have done? Or will you be using this idea? Let us know if you do! It made for a truly beautiful wedding. I will be highlighting more ideas from Anna’s wedding as we continue on with Wedding Thursday, until next week!

Wedding Thursday-Ceremony Ideas

When planning my wedding I knew I wanted a few creative touches to the ceremony but I did not want it to be too long. I didn’t want to be standing up there forever, I wanted to be married! So today I am going to share with you a few ceremony ideas and I am pulling these from my wedding, my best friends and my sisters.

-Unity Sand- I had known for awhile that I wanted to do unity sand. So I went on the hunt for a pretty unity sand vase and I wanted it to have a top because I’ve heard stories of them being knocked over. I found this beautiful unity sand vase holder with a lid! It was so pretty and I thought it would look great in our house for years to come. It came with white, black and gray sand. I was wondering what the black sand was for, well we learned to late. The black sand should have been poured in the bottom in the part you cannot see. Because we did not do that our sand only comes about halfway up. And a note: it doesn’t travel well, ours is a little mixed together but it looks pretty and it’s a great memory. We took a time in the ceremony to do the sand while the trio played music.

-Prayer Time- So this is an idea my best friend did at her wedding and I got married two months after her and she graciously allowed me to take this idea. At a point during the ceremony the pastor spoke about prayer and the importance of prayer in marriage and then invited the bridal party and the parents of the groom and bride to come up and lay hands on us (the bride and groom). There was a short silent time for everyone to pray and then the pastor said a prayer. I really loved this idea!

-Communion- Instead of doing a unity candle or sand my sister and her husband had a time of communion. There was a little table set up ready for them to take it. The pastor spoke about communion and then they had a time of communion and prayer to began their marriage. It was really beautiful and an idea I hadn’t really seen.

So these are just a few of the ceremony ideas I have been a part of and had not seen a lot. Do you have any unique ceremony ideas that you used or are planning to use? I’d love to hear any that you have!

Wedding Thursday- The dances

Ok so who thinks about their wedding and dreads being out there dancing just the two of you for this long song with everyone staring at you? That was me. Now some people may not mind the attention, after all it is your day. And some people may be wonderful dancers. I am not a wonderful dancer so we decided early on to use some cute ideas we had seen at different weddings.

First off is the first dance as husband and wife. So of course everyone is oohing and awing over you and you are so excited to be married but that song can get really long. Those of you who are married, am I right? I had a beautiful song picked and it was so long already so I picked a place to stop it but it was still 2 1/2 minutes. Seems short but not when you’re out there. So I had seen the cutest idea that I used. After about a minute of dancing we had the DJ invite the wedding party to join us on the dance floor. It allowed us time to continue to enjoy the song but also to celebrate with our wedding party, as the people we chose to stand beside us on this big day joined us on the dance floor.

Next the father/daughter dance, my dad and I had planned to go to lessons and learn what we were doing. My dad knew a little from taking ballroom dance lessons before my sisters wedding. We ended up crunched for time and did a little rehearsal at home the Sunday before the wedding. If you prioritize and make time then dance lessons are probably a good idea but we didn’t. So we got out there and started dancing and again at about 1 minute in we invited all of the fathers and daughters in attendance to join us on the dance floor. So that was really fun to have everyone out there. My favorite part was seeing my papaw dance with all three of his daughters.

So I bet you can guess where I am going with this one. The mother/son dance, we did the same thing and invited all of the mothers and sons to join the groom and his mom on the dance floor after about a minute. So it was a fun way to involve everyone in these special dances and also to get people on the dance floor ready to party!

How many of you are planning a wedding and thinking about using an idea like this? Do you have a different idea you used/or will be using at your wedding?

Photos by Jessica at Images by Daniel Michael 

Wedding Thursday-Centerpieces

So this week I am going to tell you about my centerpieces from my wedding! Tyler gave me some great ideas for wedding posts coming up soon but I have to dig out my wedding planning notebook for the information so stay tuned for that next week 🙂

Ok the first centerpiece is one that we used at my sisters wedding and before her wedding this was a centerpiece I had never seen before. In all my research for centerpiece ideas I don’t think I came across one like this. So what we did was we got a cylinder vase and then stacked miniature fishbowls topsy turvy in the cylinder vase. In the miniature fishbowls we put white roses. At my sisters wedding we put yellow roses. We put a little bit of water in the bottom of each fishbowl. There are so many options you could do with these. You could put food coloring for colored water, you could put live fish if you loved fish (we actually saw that at a wedding at our venue), pretty rocks, sand and shells and so much more just depending on the theme of your wedding.

The second centerpiece that we used was a completely last minute decision. We had ordered the flowers and were doing our own flowers and a wholesale flower place where you put together all of your own flowers, more on that later. So we showed up with fishbowls to have flowers submerged in the fishbowls. Well it ended up what they got us was not going to work so fortunately they had these lovely vases available two days before my wedding to rent. We places pins in the bottoms of the flowers to anchor them down with the rocks in the bottom. We placed the flowers in then added the water on the day of the wedding. These ended up being my favorite centerpiece and they were completely last minute. One of the wedding stressors, changes in plans. Something you learn in weddings, you must be flexible!

As you can see in the pictures we surrounded the centerpieces with little votive candles because who doesn’t like candles right? My other centerpiece involved a lot of candles. I don’t have a picture of it it seems but it was pretty straight forward. If you can see my tablecloths are lavender, they were supposed to be gray. Another unexpected change from a mistake that we unfortunately had to deal with. It looked great still but my colors were dark purple and gray. Flexibility. And really on the day of your wedding you don’t even notice everything it’s all a blur. It was a wonderful day!

Pictures were taken by Jessica at Images by Daniel Michael

Wedding Thursday!

It’s Thursday again! I love Thursdays, it’s almost the weekend, my favorite show comes on tv (The Vampire Diaries) and yeah it’s a good day. But enough about that. It’s time for another installment of Wedding Reminiscing Fun Thursday!

This week i am going to blog about my table numbers. They were one of my absolute favorite ideas for my wedding. I found a similar idea on Pintrest and then made my own version.

So the table numbers were done with pictures of us at the age of the table. So table number 1 had pictures of Tyler and myself at age 1. My initial idea was to do the pictures side by side so you could see us at the same age. But that ended up being too big for the holders. So we ended up doing a picture of me on one side then Tyler on the other side. That way no matter where you sat you would see a picture of someone and not a blank side.

I bought a big pack of gray, black and white scrapbook paper with different prints and then cut out a square a bit bigger than the 4×6 picture so there was a border. I would cut out two for each table number and stick them together using scrapbook tape. That way both sides had the same border from the paper.

The next step was to find pictures at that age that were both either horizontal or vertical. We found that a bit tricky but it all depends on what pictures you have. Once we had the pictures we stuck one to each side.

For the numbers we cut circles out of white card stock and printed on them “Us at age 1” “Us at age 2” etc. You will see from the picture. We stuck those on the top corner and then viola we had the cutest table numbers! I just loved them and it was fun for everyone to see pictures of us throughout the years and look at what each of us looked like at that age.

I hope someone finds this idea fun, cute and useful! Let me know your thoughts 🙂

 

Pictures by Jessica at Images by Daniel Michael

Reminiscing Wedding Fun Thursday!

So my husband and I were looking at our wedding photo slideshow last night and it got me reminiscing on planning my wedding and what fun I had with that. Of course there were many stressful moments but I had a few touches at my wedding that I just loved. So let’s call this reminiscing wedding fun Thursday shall we? I will try to post one of these each Thursday until I run out of things, and that may be fast. But we will see! So here we go with # 1.

One of my favorite things that I did and absolutely love is my guestbook. My sister got married exactly a year and 5 days before me and I had been holding onto this idea for at least three or four years since I had seen it at another wedding. So I did it for her and then for myself. I am a big fan of scrapbooking so I was able to incorporate scrapbooking with my guestbook.

The general idea is to take a scrapbook and to put on the front of each page in the center one of our engagement pictures. The rest of the page was open for everyone to sign and leave notes. I loved this idea because it allowed for everyone to leave more than just their name but to also leave notes and I preferred it that way.

At my sisters wedding we put a page at each table with pens for everyone to sign. At my wedding however the tables were already quite crowded so we put all of the sheets in the scrapbook and had a guestbook table where people could come by and sign the book.

It turned out great and I love being able to look back and see who was there and what they had to say! So that is my reminiscing wedding fun Thursday post! I hope you all enjoyed and I hope someone uses this idea and enjoys it as much as we did!

Happy Thursday!

P.S. You will notice the page the photographer took a picture of is from my adorable little girls I used to nanny for who were my wonderful flower girls! A good choice because I don’t think anyone else drew pictures!

 

Pictures by Jessica at Images by Daniel Michael