This April I will be celebrating my 4th wedding anniversary. It seems like the past few years have just flown by. From the moment that I was first engaged I knew I wanted to have a fun outdoor wedding and that there were several DIY projects that I wanted to try. I compiled several design boards and started brainstorming ways to keep a very minimal budget and still have the wedding of my dreams. I started to cut out pictures and put them all in clear protective sleeves and made categories to keep everything super organized. After changing my colors and themes several times, I finally decided that I wanted my colors to be green, brown and crisp white with a touch of rustic charm.
Our biggest task was putting all of our flowers together. We purchased them from Sam's Club and assembled them the day before the wedding. We spent $350 on flowers and had more than we knew what to do with.
This is what we used:
Here were a few things that I liked:
The Inspiration was a mix of the above three pictures. I really liked the glass jars filled with silica jelly balls. Wheat grass was a great way to add fun texture to the tables in an inexpensive way and the napkins over the edge of the table was a fun way to place them.
The Inspiration of this Chuppa was light and airy and I loved everything about it.
We cut down bamboo from a friend's yard. I bought the fabric at a discount fabric warehouse for $20.00 total and the flowers were all synthetic from Michaels. I think it turned out awesome and you could not even tell the flowers were fake!
The End results:
The Inspiration were these fern invitations at Michaels once again and they were only $25.00 per box and came with 50 invites. I made guest accommodation cards. It takes time to print and assemble all of the cards but with a little BFF help you can knock it out quickly.
My brother is an awesome baker so we enlisted him to bake our cake for us and said surprise up. We told him what flavor we wanted and said have fun! He did an awesome job and it was a great highlight on our dessert table.
The End Results:
The biggest risk of my wedding was my dress. I was searching Craigslist and could not find what I was looking for so started searching in larger cities to see if there were nicer dresses. All of my family still lives in California so I enlisted the help of my aunt to go look at a $700 dress that a girl was selling for $150. She noted the dress had not been worn because the wedding never happened but that it was preserved in a box and had not been touched in 3 months. My aunt saw the dress and said it was beautiful and we decided to wing it. She shipped me the dress and it was all history. Needless to say, unless you MUST have a brand new dress, try buying used to save tons of money!
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| Fresh off of the UPS truck |
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| Proud owner of a wedding dress |
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| Mom saying, "Suck it in!" |
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| It fits like a glove |
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| Pre-wedding workouts paid off and helped manage stress |
In the end, it was totally worth in and we kept the costs super low and we had a beautiful wedding day!
I know that I left a ton of stuff out but please email me if you have any DIY wedding questions!
