Wedding: DIYs

With the number of DIYs I worked on for the wedding, I really wished I had spent more time documenting the process. I was always very excited to get each project done and somewhere along the line I forgot to bring my camera along at those crucial moments. But anyway, here's a brief rundown of some of the projects I took on, and how I did them:

• Glitter word banners: I made five of these banners for various stations around the reception and on the stage at the ceremony. I am not going to lie - they took ages! I cut the letters out of card with a stanley knife, slathered them with glue and then shook glitter all over them. That was a lot of glitter! Then I attached the letters to brown twine using a hot glue gun. Super simple to replicate, just put a good TV show on in the background and be prepared to get cutting for hours.
• Animal cake toppers: We had a different vintage animal placed on each of our cakes to advertise their flavours. I spray painted the animals gold, ensuring there were no gaps, and then drilled a fine hole in each of their backs. Then I wound wire around a pencil to make a circle and bent the rest of the wire at a right angle, before sticking it into the animal's back with some super glue. Finally, I stamped the flavour on a shipping tag and inserted it into the circle of wire.
• Hair piece: I saved so much money making this myself. I found a pale blush velvet flower on an Etsy millinery store, and simply hot glued an alligator hair clip onto the back. With fine fishing line, I sewed some of the leaves down to the rest of the flower to ensure they couldn't be bent the wrong way. This project required a lot of trial and error as I was initially using a comb to secure the flower and it kept falling out. Hot glue turned out to be my surprising saviour.
• Here Comes the Bride banner: This was another painstaking project. I bought a wooden stick from Bunnings and had it cut down to size. Then I cut the burlap to my desired shape and sewed the top down with a hole big enough for the stick to go through. Next, I cut the word stencil out of card using a stanley knife and pinned it to the burlap. Using two coats of paint, I stippled paint through the stencil to make out the words. Then I stitched around the edge of the banner to help prevent it from fraying.
• Gold flamingoes and animals: The flamingoes were bought at a local gift shop and the animals were a bulk vintage eBay find. They both got a spraying of gold paint, with the flamingoes going on to be aisle markers and the animals acting as favours.
• Garlands: I made two different kinds of these. The first kind were vintage floral sheets that I cut into wide strips, sewed together in one long line and then cut up 4/5 of the way to create tassels. The second was made using lace curtains in all different patterns, cutting into small strips and then knotting onto a long piece of rope. Very simple but they looked pretty all hung up together.
• Coat hangers: I lierally did this the day before the wedding as a little something to give to my bridesmaids (and one for me too!). Using wooden coat hangers and silver glitter letters from Spotlight, I stuck letters spelling out each girl's name onto the top of the hanger. Then I tied a little bow around the handle using lace ribbon I had lying around. Voila!
• Veil: I can't take too much credit for this one as my mother made it, but I oversaw the process! We bought fine stretch tulle and read a few vague internet tutorials to get a rough idea how to do it. The shape was cut, and then bunched at the top and sewn onto a comb. If you're wanting to make your own veil too I'd suggest checking out some proper tutorials to get a feel for how to do it. My veil ended up only costing me $5, talk about a bargain.

There were a few more things that I have already posted photos of too, such as the chalkboard drinks menu, chalkboard speech bubbles and photo booth props. Making all these things myself saved me so much money and I am really happy with how they turned out. And there were so many more parts of the wedding that were semi-DIY, like the stationary, or a case of me sourcing all the parts that went into them, like the lolly buffet, cake table or guest book. All the little signs and tags were hand stamped or made by me, and the vintage props were lovingly collected over a few months.

I got so much satisfaction making so many things for the day (and Marc, my dad and my mum helped with many of them too!). Everything looked so 'Jessie and Marc', and it was a great feeling to enter the reception and see how Jess Butcher had so wonderfully styled everything. I think it's really important for couples to put their own individual stamp on their days, and I think we got the message of us across best with the DIYs we incorporated.

photographer: Christine Lim / second photographer: Ruby Yeo