| Guest Post: DIY DetailsA Batty Life

As you suspected another one of Liz’s coworkers here :) I got married in June and continue to be obsessed with wedding details and was just the personal attendant and DIY helper for one of my best friend’s wedding in France! For those of you who think DIY is for the crafty girl who has too much time on her hands…think again! Yes there are some DIY projects you see in the magazines that would take hours and may end up costing more than just buying the item, BUT with a little creativity you can add some great personal touches that really make the wedding feel like you and you can save some money while you’re at it.

A few ideas:

Welcome boxes- seeing all the beautiful welcome gifts for guests in magazines like personalized bottles of wine, entire city guides complete with gourmet gifts, etc can be inspiring until you price it all out. Yikes! I bought simple brown boxes from uline.com (our go to source for all things packaging at work) complete with inexpensive crinkle paper and went to town at Costo- each box had a few granola bars, bags of pretzels, gum, bottled water and a map of Chicago we got for free. We also printed off simple circle stickers with our names and dates for the front. Each box had a “welcome” letter and we received many “thanks” for these little additions
Activities for kids- again you can go all out but we just bought silver garden pails, put a few coloring books inside and some other $1.00 finds from Target to keep the little ones entertained
Programs- My mom made my programs on her computer and printed at Kinkos, no need to have these embossed or anything crazy, it’s just the program! But they looked great. My friend Thi and I made the programs for Cailen’s wedding (don’t have a photo) but they looked beautiful and were done by hand.
Placecards- for Cailen’s place cards we bought the business card size paper at Paper Source, and then used a stamp that cuts out corners in various shapes (from JoAnn fabrics) to make them look totally special, I hand wrote them and we tied them to little bundles of lavendar (she bought wholesale) after all we were in France!
Jewelry- I make jewelry so I made my bridesmaids necklaces and also the necklaces for Cailen’s bridesmaids. A special touch and hopefully a gift they will wear again :)
Favors- again we had lots of grand ideas for these, but ended up making a donation to my brother’s Peace Corps project in El Salvador, it ended up being much more meaningful than one more little trinket. However, we couldn’t resist doing the personalized match books with the eiffel tower since we were going to France for our honeymoon- we got them on sale at the Knot and they were great. They also came in handy for the cigar bar my dad set out for the guys

Below are a few photos from my wedding and from my dear friend Cailen’s wedding to show that a little DIY can fit in with any style from a city wedding (mine) to a cheateau in France. Enjoy!