Monogram Pillows

I fell in love withe idea of burlap pillows for the reception location. I knew I wanted to incorporate the couches at the reception into the seating arrangement, and knew I needed to decorate them. I found a whole bunch of inspiration on Pinterest and I decided I had to have burlap pillows since burlap was quickly becoming a theme: burlap runners, burlap barstool covers, burlap chair covers. My mom pulled out a giant piece of fabric I apparently bought many years ago for a project and never used. It wasn't burlap, but it had a great texture and I knew it would be useful for home decor after the wedding. We sewed them, stuffed them and marked them with a B... I mean G.

We simply cut out squares. I used a stencil I bought at Hobby Lobby (the same font as my cake topper monogram, by the way) and attached it to the fabric with blue painter's tape. I used regular craft paint from Walmart.

For the border, I used a Cricut cut out and traced it onto the pillow with a pencil and then painted over the trace.

For the burlap runner on the back of the couch, I'll post another tutorial. Cost: Fabric, free. Paint, I had around the house from my chalkboard project (again, another tutorial). Stuffing, on hand. Stencil, for the whole alphabet, I paid $7 and used them for two other projects. Total project cost: man hours and $7.

Moss Ball Arrangements

We created these two arrangements to fit on the two columns located at the front of the church, using, in part, this tutorial. The only thing was that it was kind of expensive to buy the foam balls. So I went to the dollar store and got two inflatable balls. One was Winnie the Pooh and the other was Dora the Explorer. I used spray adhesive and rolled them in the moss.

Finally, we put them inside two urns we found at Hobby Lobby, added a faux draping piece of greenery, a fake spider mum from Old Time Pottery, and we had an arrangement that we didn't have to pay a florist to create. Cost of arrangement: $2 for the balls, $20 for the urns (we used our online 40% off coupon) at Hobby Lobby, $4 for the spider mums, $4 for the moss, $8 for the greenery, and $2 for the florist foam at the dollar store. Total cost: $40.

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.