Make It

The Wedding Guest Book As A Quilt

Yesterday I posted a link to a wedding on Style Me Pretty featuring pizza for the catering. There are a number of ideas I want to steal from that wedding, here's another one. A fabric guest book: guests write a note on a scrap of muslin with a fabric pen. After the wedding, they are all pieced together and quilted as a memento of the big day.

Let's Talk Pizza Again

Matt, while not as pizza-obsessed as I am, is certainly fan of the dish as well. We use pizza to mark our anniversary and Valentine's Day every year and the only reason that we didn't go out for pizza the night he proposed is because Ann Arbor doesn't have any nice ambiance pizza places. As we talk about having our wedding in the backyard, we're considering asking our neighbor for the use of his backyard wood fired oven for the occasion so our guests can make pizzas under the stars. (Here's a look at a wedding featured on Style Me Pretty featuring pizza for the catering.)

Here are some old photos from this year's Valentine's meal. Our first experiment with homemade deep dish pizza (using a Cooks Illustrated recipe) and a rhubarb/raspberry ice cream concoction that turned out the perfect shade of Valentine's pink.

Balloons Are Cheap and Chic

Having a wedding on a budget doesn't mean we want to sacrifice style and I don't really think we'll need to. Wedding blogs and magazines like MS Weddings are so chockful of DIY projects and resources that the only limit to what we can pull off at the wedding is the amount of effort we're willing to put in.

Lately, I've become a big fan of oversized balloons, which seem to offer the most bang for their buck. Matt is dubious, so this post is for him. 

 

(Image Credit) 

 

(Image Credit) 

The trick is to stick with the matte-finish oversized latex ones and use a limited color palette. I've found a variety of colors here, six 36" balloons for $13. We'll also have to factor in the cost of a helium inflater if we go this route.

And of course, there's this:

 

 

Alabama Chanin DIY Style Wedding Dress

 

 The dress is probably the element of the wedding that I'm least interested in. Food, yep. Venue, yep. Decor, yep. Invitations, of course. Dress, meh.

I'm not much of a clothes person anyway, and though I'd love to find a great dress for the wedding, it's certainly taking a backseat to other considerations. But if I were so inclined to spend my time on a DIY wedding dress project, I just might think of trying my hand at a dress in the spirit of Alabama Chanin.

I've been a fan of Natalie Chanin ever since Project Alabama, which was getting big press back when I still lived in Birmingham in high school. My love of her work only continued to grow when I received her sewing book for my birthday last year. I am a huge fan of the emphasis on hand crafts and re-use of found fabrics. Call me crazy, but I'm convinced that you could make an Alabama Chanin style dress like this:

 

 With a little creative embroidery and applique work on an American Apparel dress like this: 

What do you say, can anything remotely wedding appropriate be created from the work of Dov Charney? 

Paper Napkins and Bamboo Plates...At A Wedding?

 

As I mentioned in the previous post, I'm not averse to using paper napkins at our wedding, as long as they are jazzed up in some way. In keeping with my theme of laidback (don't forget affordable!) style, I think some of these IKEA paper napkins would fit the bill nicely. I am crazy over the grey striped and turquoise dotted ones. (Above: Varse napkins $2.49/30pk, Below: Nara napkins $1.99/50pk)

 

For a minute, when I was having my Bridezilla moment, I was kind of horrified at the idea of using paper or disposable tabletop items for a wedding. Then I got over it. One thing that helps is seeing others using these items. Disposable plates and paper napkins brings up images of the standard and boring white versions. But when I saw bamboo plates and flatware in the photos of Laura Normandin's wedding, it was like a lightbulb went off in my brain. Another perfect marriage of style and functionality (she even used custom printed paper napkins as well). 

 

Disposable plates and flatware are especially important because we have a small kitchen, no dishwasher, and we may be avoiding the traditional catering route in favor of another option. It's not the most eco-friendly option but for one day, it's fine with me. (Veneerware 9in plates $73/100pk)

 

 

Backyard Wedding Inspiration: Lena Corwin

Since we've decided to do a backyard wedding, I keep coming back to Lena Corwin's wedding for what seems like endless streams of inspiration. It's just so stylish and laidback and completely fun.

I flipped when I looked closely at this photo in the Martha Stewart slideshow. I had been considering making my own cloth napkins from my fabric stash but - even though I have more than a year to work on it - I wasn't jazzed about the idea of hemming 80+ napkins. But when I looked closely at this image, I found a solution. It looks to be a swatch of brightly colored fabric trimmed with pinking shears and then wrapped around a paper napkin. The functionality and convenience of a paper napkin combined with the sytlistic flair of a fabric napkin. She used a same technique for the fabric coasters also- simply trimming them with pinking shears and not worrying about hemming. This is the same type of approach I want to keep in mind as we plan the wedding: laid back style. More photos from this wedding can be found on Lena's Flickr stream and Martha Stewart.

A Backyard Wedding

In the month that I've been engaged, I've had a touch of Bridezilla but at this point, I think I've nipped it in the bud. It's best to catch these things early on. Initially, Matt and I talked about making use of our large backyard to have a DIY wedding, but then I started cruising wedding blogs and started thinking that we had to put on some bigger production for what would surely be THE BEST DAY OF OUR LIVES. The Wedding Industrial Complex grabbed hold of me for a hot minute and I was frantically looking for a suitable wedding location to accommodate the guest list of approx 200 that we had come up with.

But then I took a step back, took a few breaths and realized that I had gotten so far off track from my original idea that I was already getting stressed out, 16 months before the big day. That's not the kind of wedding I want to have and not the kind of person I want to be. So we've now returned to the original idea, and to make it work with our space, we're planning to keep the guest list around 60 - 80. We're thinking about summer 2011, which will give us enough time to prep all our DIY projects, research so we can get the best deals, and get our backyard in order. (Image via Once Wed)

Glassybaby

Matt and I have started to look for a wedding venue in Ann Arbor but have had a hard time finding exactly the space we want. In the meantime, I'm daydreaming about decor elements. If I had $4,000 to spend on favors, I'd buy 100 glassybabies for tabletop decor and then have each guest take one home at the end of the night. File this one under "Daydream."

They do have an interesting rental program- for $5/each you can rent glassybabies for events. Though I'm not sure if you have to be in the same city as one of their stores.

Do you know of any colored votives similar in style, but not similar in price, to glassybaby?