Do-It-Yourself Tips

You’ve calculated your time and the cost and you’re ready to forge ahead with making some of your wedding items. Perhaps a few of these tips will seem obvious to the do-it-yourself bride, but here are some of the ways we kept costs within our budget and still got exactly what we wanted.

Get thee to a library! I can’t recommend this enough! There is such a wealth of good information on the subject of weddings at the library I don’t know why a bride would go anywhere else. With the exception of pictures of up-to-date bridal fashions, magazines add little to what library books have to offer, and the library books are there to use free of charge.

Use materials you have on hand! Look around your home and garden and you may be surprised at the resources you’ve got all around you! For example, every year I cut the English lavender from my garden. When the flowers have finished opening I cut them with long stems about two feet long, bundle them in a sort of sheaf, and put them in a large vase to dry and scent the house. I took this dried lavender and sprayed it with clear acrylic to keep it from falling apart and we used it in the corsages and table decorations. We also used sprigs of fresh rosemary from the garden in our table decorations. All of this was free!

Shop at discount or thrift stores. We found the majority of our glass candle holders at The Dollar Store, both the ten inch tall cylinders and the four inch globes. Not only did they only cost $1 each they were all made in the U.S.A., an added bonus in my humble opinion. We also purchased plastic candy dishes there -- 4 for $1. Additionally, all kinds of inexpensive glassware may be found at thrift stores.

We purchased inexpensive glass and high quality candles to achieve the look we wanted for table decorations.

Tip: I do not recommend buying candles from discount stores. They often don’t burn evenly and you end up with a mess. You can find higher quality, longer burning candles online for the same price. We recommend shopping at Quick Candles.

Use coupons. Put yourself on the mailing lists of the fabric and craft stores in your area and use their coupons each week. Whether you use a coupon printed at home off the internet or clip one out of the newspaper, the savings add up. You might even ask friends to share their own coupons if they aren’t using them. I don’t think we bought anything from Michael’s, Beverly’s, or Joann’s Fabrics without using a coupon or waiting for a sale. There is absolutely no reason to pay retail if you give yourself enough time to make things because sales come around regularly and, even if they don’t, the coupons do.

Shop in season. Part of my plan for buying the food was to wait until Christmastime, purchase hams on sale, and freeze them until the wedding. If I had planned to serve turkey, well, I would’ve only waited until Thanksgiving. My point is this: even food goes on sale and can be purchased at a discount. I decided what fruit to serve at the wedding based on what was in season the week of the wedding rather than deciding what I wanted ahead of time and then trying to find it. For example, as much as I would’ve loved to offer strawberries to our guests, the wedding was in the last week of February and strawberries aren’t in season until April. The hot house strawberries in the stores in February were expensive and not so tasty. We bought Clementine oranges and red seedless grapes instead since they were available in abundance and on sale.

Food isn’t the only thing you can buy “in season”. Paper goods and craft supplies can also be less expensive at different times of the year. For example, if your wedding colors include red, shopping directly after Christmas or Valentine’s Day will yield a LOT of red items in the sale bin. This could include strings of lights, candles, ribbon, streamers, dinnerware, cups, table cloths, stationery, candy, you name it! The same goes for other holidays. Want green items on sale? Check the stores after St. Patrick’s Day. Your colors are pastels? Check after Easter. You get the idea.

Though I don’t normally look at Craig’s List, garage sales, and the “Freebies” section of the newspaper, I have friends who do! And one friend found all the lights we used at the reception at a garage sale. She wouldn’t tell me what she spent but assured me it was “too good to pass up” and gave them to us. Remember, people get married everyday, and after the wedding is over many of those folks are looking to get rid of their wedding decorations!

The bottom line is this: low cost doesn’t necessarily translate into low quality. Careful shopping for discounts can still produce a good looking, high quality wedding for a fraction of what “the industry” would have you pay. It’s well worth a bride’s time to research items first and shop around for discounts.