Craigslist find: Manzanita Trees

Early on in the planning process, I saw the Manzanita trees I wanted on Etsy for $80 a piece. Obviously, that didn't fit my decorating budget. That didn't squelch my desire to have these little table top trees as my centerpieces for the reception. So, when I found an awesome deal on Craigslist for these, I hopped in the car and took off. We got 8 trees for under $100. That's a deal!

The pink flowers weren't my taste, but they were hot glued on. So, we just heated up the glue by aiming a hair dryer at each glob for about 30 seconds and pulled them off. We also spray painted them brown because they were previously black. The crystals went back on and we hot glued moss onto the base to cover the florist cubes holding the trees in place.

To make the balls, we used this tutorial from dollar store crafts blog and modified it. We used the same circle punch, created the cones with the lunch bag cutouts and then hot glued them to tiny newspaper balls. Basically, a tiny coffee filter ball. I think they look slightly like hydrangeas, except, you know, brown. Total project for center pieces: $100 for trees, $5 for spray paint, $2 for moss and $1 for a package of brown lunch bags from the dollar store. Total investment = less than $110.

Moss Letters

One of my favorite projects was making the moss letters for the church doors. I realize there are a ton of tutorials out there, but I thought I'd just put it out there one more time.

The first thing I did was make a giant letter using Publisher. It printed out on several 8.5 x 11 sheets. I cut the letter out and taped it together. I taped it down onto foam board and traced it. This is the part where I really wished I would have used cardboard. I found the foam board was very difficult to cut with an exacto knife. So, we used the Drimmel tool and cut it out. We used spray adhesive and glued the moss on top and sides.

Gift Table Banner

We made this table banner for both the gift table and the sweetheart table. First, we applied a teastain to paper doilies we purchased at the dollar store using a paintbrush.

We let them dry for a few hours.

We cut some scrapbook paper to match the dimensions of the center of the doilies, cut letters out using our Cricut machine and glued them on. We hotglued each piece onto a length of twine and then used safety pins to attach to the tablecloth so it wouldn't cause any damage to the rented linens.

Coffee Filter Light

We made this light out of an empty letter we thrifted. Paper Street Market in St. Petersburg sells these letters salvaged from old store signs. They sell ones that have the covers on them and some without. When I found this G, I picked it up. I wanted to create a pretty way to display it with lights inside. First, we drilled a hole in the back of the letter big enough to pull a plug through. We bought a piece of regular posterboard, traced the outline of the letter and cut it out. We used a hole punch and then pushed each bulb of the Christmas lights through the holes.

Then we used our coffee filter cones (see earlier post) and hot glued them on to the posterboard. We pushed down the posterboard inside the letter.

Disclaimer: I'm not guaranteeing that the Christmas lights will not catch the filters on fire. We kept it on for several hours and it didn't get hot, so we felt pretty safe. We put the letter on our cake table.

Coffee Filter Pomanders

I bought a whole bunch of coffee filters at the dollar store (over 20 packages, each had 300 filters). We pushed a pencil inside the center of each one, and scrunched the filters around the pencil. It created the cone shape you see here. We dunked them into a pot of tea and let them air dry. It took a good 12 hours for the filters to dry. If we lost patience, we stuck them in the oven at the lowest temp setting for about 20 minutes.

We hot glued the cones all over a tennis ball sized newspaper ball and added a loop of ribbon. Each ball took at least 125 filters to get the extremely full look. Photo credit goes to Earthen Vessels Photography.

We roughly followed this tutorial: http://heysisblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/coffee-filter-pom-poms-three-ways.html Coffee filter pomanders: About $20 for the coffee filters. We used tea we had on hand and newspapers I had saved for a couple of months. For 18 pews, I used three spools of ribbon that I also bought at the dollar store. Pew decor total: less than $25.

Venues

When it came time for my fiance and I to choose venues (less than two days after we got engaged), I knew that I wanted one church. And one church only.

Polk County hosts some very beautiful churches, but I've always envisioned a white chapel for my wedding. After scouring the web for venues for several months before I was even engaged (I wanted to be ready!), I found the perfect church. It happens to be in the city of Homeland and owned by Polk County.

It's also a great value. The cost of using it for the wedding and rehearsal was $250.

It's very difficult to find professional photographers who have shot weddings here, but it's gorgeous. When I went in for the first time and closed the door behind me, it felt so sacred and I was impressed by its simplistic beauty.



The reception venue was a little harder to come up with on a small budget. With country clubs, hotel ballrooms, even public community rooms ranging out of my budget, I started to get a little bit frustrated. I almost decided to bite the bullet and shell out some big bucks for a total un-inspirational space. The City of Lakeland was having an event on our date, so they wouldn't rent any of the 1920s inspired space we looked at.

But, this spend thrift girl didn't give up.

Okay, that's NOT true. Total lie. My fiance, flipping through the piles of venue info I'd printed, picked out one he really liked, even though it was totally out of our price range.

"Let's just go and see it," he said. Not willing to be a Bridezilla, I figured it wouldn't hurt to check it out. Lake Mirror Tower has a banquet room on the bottom floor. As soon as walked in, I wanted it. Tall ceilings, arched windows and 20s inspired light fixtures gave it train-station feeling. The only problem: the price.

The building, above the first floor, has been converted to apartments. My fiance has a couple of friends who live there. After looking through the brochure, we saw the clause that a resident can rent it without a deposit and for a much smaller price! We leaned on our connections and found a friend who would be willing to help us out. So, we had a venue and for the perfect price.

Color Scheme

The first thing I did was choose a color scheme. My favorite color has been brown for quite some time now and I couldn't pass it up. I knew I wanted accents of ivory. I especially didn't want a white, white dress. However, the browns and creams are more reminiscent of a fall wedding than they are spring colors. Since my date was set for April, I needed to give it a spring color to liven it up. I fell in love with the mossy letters on etsy.com.



So, I added mossy green to the mix.

Ivory, Champagne, Burlap, Mocha, Truffle and Moss were the final picks for the color scheme.

Then, I came across gorgeous photos like these and I was head over heels in love with my scheme.