My D.I.Y. wedding

Let me start off by saying if you are planning a D.I.Y. wedding, you better be prepared to dedicate a HUGE amount of time to doing so. Being a D.I.Y. bride is hard work. Not only do you have the stress of being a bride but you are handcrafting a butt load of items that all your guests will be looking at. So they have to be awesome.
When I first got engaged we went right to vendor hiring. That was pretty easy for us since I already knew who I would want to have at our wedding. My problem was the design of the event. There were so many things I loved but I could not find them, or I didn't want to pay for them. (i became very cheap when it came down to paying for decor). We had no "theme" or color scheme, we just went with things we love. It was a hodge podge of randomness that meshed beautifully in the end.
My D.I.Y. list consisted of the following:
1. fabric bouquets (this was a trial and error situation, I thought I wanted funky printed fabric flowers but ended up with solid rolled fabric flowers. After I had made a bunch of the funky ones of course. Then I had to figure out how to assemble them into a bouquet! It took a while but I finally got it. They turned out awesome. Shown below is mine but I also made my girls' as well.

2. Painted silverware... UGH.. This was a project that took forever. Mainly because we wanted vintage silverware to paint, because the handles are so much more ornate. It took us months to find enough silverware for everyone. Once we did Shane took the liberty of painting them all. They turned out amazing as well. This was a job that I didn't think we would get finished, but we did.

3. I wanted to make candy buttons for the sweets table.. So I made a few. These things were messy as all get out. The buttons were so tiny they were hard to get out of the molds, but they were cute. We scattered them along the base of our cakes and other random areas on the dessert table.

4. Flower girl toss. I did not want to have our adorable flower girl toss flower petals, I though at first glitter or feathers but decided some fabric hearts would be much cooler. Plus I had a ton of fabric cut from my initial fabric flower idea.

5. Napkins. I wanted fun printed napkins for the tables. My original plan was to cut them and bind the edges, but since I put this project off till last minute I skipped the edge binding and just used pinking shears to create a cute little edge. They took forever as well because after cutting them all I had to press them so they laid nice and flat.

6. I also made the menu cards as seen above and our programs which I didn't take a photo of but they were cool! I will post pro pics once we get them back tomorrow. :) YAY!

7. Escort cards.. I ordered paper straws along time ago and wanted to use them somewhere.  I went with the soda bottle and attached the escort cards onto them with a ribbon and stuck the straws on them as well. They were cute. :)

8. Table numbers.. I just cut numbers out of fabric and suck them on a piece of kraft paper and inserted them into an Ikea frame. Easy peasy.

9. A big project was the floral centerpieces. In the beginning I was going to make all fabric flowers for the centerpieces.. well... that didn't happen. So instead, after thrifting a mother load of vintage glass I decided I would use real flowers. I wanted to create a wildflower look that was not to "put together" looking. My friend Nikita and I went out 2 days prior to the wedding and started picking flowers from the side of the road like crazy people. Since it is early fall we lucked out with a ton of yellow, purple and white flowers. But I wanted more color so I went and bought a TON of bouquets from Kroger and took them apart and created our centerpieces. For this job, I had  help from Shane and our friend/officiant. It took way longer than I thought it would to put all of the centerpieces together because I wanted a ton of smaller ones.
This is our kitchen after the flower arranging madness.

A few other things I made but are not pictured was the aisle decor, which was a few billy balls and some iron wedding tied together with a ribbon. They were attached to every other row of chairs. Simple yet pretty. CD's of all music for the prelude, ceremony and dinner.  Boutonnières for the guys. I believe that is everything.

Sorry the photos are dark, they were all taken from my phone. I will be doing another post when we get our photos back from the amazing Steph Carson. You can get a sneak peek at our wedding by clicking on Steph's name. :)