There are plenty of DIY touches that you can incorporate into your own big day, even if you’re not a dab hand at crafting. Here’s what some of our real-life brides have done with great success!
Homemade confetti
“I made our confetti cones from vintage sheet music and individually punched out every bit of confetti” says real-life bride Hannah.
Vintage recycling
“Our favours were recycled baby food jars filled with speckled eggs and covered with different vintage fabrics,” Hannah continues. “We used recycled card and hand-stamped ‘Mr and Mrs North’ on each one. The children had white chocolate buttons in theirs.”
Scrabble anyone?
Real-life bride Karen decided to add elements of her favourite board game to her wedding decorations.
“The place names were made from Scrabble tiles, which were all sourced from eBay,” says Karen. “This was a year-long project involving a highly complex spreadsheet detailing the letter distribution in a traditional packet of Scrabble tiles, and the letters we needed to spell everyone’s names! I ended up frantically chasing some elusive letters (Js and Ks were the hardest to source!) and my final J arrived on the Monday before the wedding!”
Crafty touches
Crafty bride-to-be Katherine made lots of brightly coloured felt hearts, as well as bunting, luggage tags, tissue paper pom poms and homemade cupcakes – phew!
Custom boxes
We had our engagement shoot in the Booth Museum in Brighton, so we bought some old specimen boxes while we were there,” says Siobhan. “Then Ben spruced them up to use as card boxes and we mounted some pictures of our parents’ and grandparents’ weddings on them.”
Seaside finishing touches
Tabitha and Daniel put their hearts and souls into finding the perfect vintage seaside-themed finishing touches for their wedding and their hard work really paid off!
“We bought lots of boats in bottles, collected shells, pebbles, and nautical trinkets to style our wedding,” recalls Tabitha. “We even had a special surfboard made as an alternative guest book, which everyone wrote well wishes and good luck messages on. The best part of the wedding planning for me was definitely hunting around car boot sales and markets with Dan finding unique pieces that would reflect us as a couple, and all at bargain prices!”
Fabulous homemade favours
“We spent the year before our wedding collecting antique teacups and making gingham and lilac cloths for the tables.” says real bride Aileen. “Our tables were also named after vintage sweets, and each table had a jar of those particular sweets on it, to identify it.”
“I made the favours myself,” she continues. “They were pastel-coloured paper bags filled with retro sweets and homemade gingerbread bunnies.”
One final thought. If you are planning some DIY aspects to your wedding, then real-life bride Amber has some imporatant advice for you… “Plan your projects and do them way in advance! We started making things eight months before the wedding day, and still didn’t have enough time to do all the things we wanted to!”
