How To: DIY Your Wedding Decorations

When we re-launched the APW How-To series, I told y’all that my goal was to create a Lazy Girl’s Guide To Making Sh*t. No overly intensive DIY tutorials here, just a simple over-view of the project, and common sense plan for getting it done, should you choose to attempt it. Well, I should have know that Lauren, she of Suburbalicious, and she of getting married the same day as we did, would create the best lazy girl’s guide of all. Here is here tale of tackling decorations: first pick a place you don’t need to decorate much, and second make paper flowers. Wheee! Also? Funny. Here we go:

How to DIY your reception decorations. On the cheap.

Step 1. Pick a reception site that doesn’t really need to be decorated. This could be the first and last step if you find a great place. We decided on a bar/restaurant in downtown Boston with floor-to-ceiling windows, red drapes, and couches and lounge chairs in the main space. It was pretty, but I wanted something to distract from the ugly drop ceiling and the bizarre fish tank in the middle of the room. I did not, however, want to spend any money on it. Enter: paper flowers.

DIY wedding decor

Step 2. Email the delightful Kimi for directions on how to make the gorgeous paper flowers that she had at every place setting at her wedding. Attempt to make equally pretty ones and fail. Miserably.

Step 3. Look up incredibly simple Mexican paper flower instructions online. Remember that when you were little and would go to Disney World, you always wanted to buy a giant paper flower that they sold outside of Pirates of the Caribbean. Your mother, every time, waved her had dismissively and said “No way. We could make that ourselves.” But she never did. Decide that making hundreds of paper flowers for your wedding is the perfect payback for this.

Step 4. Recruit your mother, your future mother in law, and all of their friends to start folding some tissue paper. Start watching terrible TV just to kill time while you are folding tissue paper. End up making enough to decorate the chapel AND the reception site. Get your husband to take a picture of this insanity a week before the wedding.

Step 5. Recruit your aunts to decorate the chapel with the paper flowers before the ceremony. Recruit an amazing and responsible friend that for some reason did not make the wedding guest list to set up the flowers at your reception site. If your friend is an artist, this could be immensely helpful.

DIY paper wedding flowers

Step 6. Watch your family and friends dance with Mexican paper flowers in their hair all night long.

Step 7. Feel sad when you see the staff at the end of the night sweeping your huge piles of paper flowers into trash bags. Then remember that regular flowers get thrown out too, but those cost money, and feel pretty damn good about the whole thing.

Photos by: Lisa Rigby Photgraphy

*I should have probably said something about relinquishing control about what they actually look like, since everyone will want to make them differently and your mom will want to put them on sticks, but it won’t matter in the end.

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