DIY Wedding Flowers for under $500

For any bride-on-a-budget out there, I’m sure you can share my frustration at the rising cost of all things wedding. Wedding flowers are no exception to that rule. Quotes for flowers can range anywhere from $1,500 to $10,000 depending on the size of the wedding, types of flowers and number of arrangements. And wedding flowers seem to bring a special premium with them. I had a fellow bride tell that she got drastically different quotes for flowers when she asked about wedding flowers vs. when she said she was planning a ‘special family event’.

Not surprisingly I decided early on I would be tackling the bouquets, boutonnieres, and arrangements for my wedding on my own. The quickly developing theme for the wedding became, “If we can make it, we’re not buying it.” And while my husband-to-be put up with weekly trips to Joanne’s I was endlessly dreaming of the next DIY project that I could add to the mix of our wedding day. 

6 Tips for Wearing Your Mother’s Wedding Dress

When Kevin and I started planning our wedding in the fall of 2013, we knew that we were going to have to get creative in stretching our budget in order to create the day that we had always dreamed of. Don’t get me wrong, our parents were very generous and we had some savings of our own. We just knew that we couldn’t afford what most wedding venues charge for a 100 person wedding, let alone the flowers, favors, clothes, and everything else that comes with the modern wedding.

Even before my engagement I had planned on trying to repurpose my mother’s wedding dress for the occasion, both for sentimental reasons and in hopes of saving some money. While I had never seen the dress in person, I knew from the pictures that it had the lacy detailing and A-line shape that I wanted for my own wedding day.

On the front end there were several things that made it possible for me to wear my mother’s wedding dress.

1. My mom’s dress had been very well preserved. When I opened the box, there was a seal on it dating back to 1986. The dress had not been exposed to any light or severe temperatures in almost 30 years because of the way it had been stored.

Easy Lamp Update

One of the things that you will quickly learn about me is that I don’t like to throw things away, especially if it’s not already biodegradable or recycleable in some way. I also don’t like accumulating too much stuff. My husband knows well that if it hasn’t been used, worn, played with, or read in a few months it needs to find a new home 🙂 This combination of passions usually results in frequent trips to the local thrift store or those bright yellow bins where you can drop clothes and books. But sometimes, a lucky item will become the object of my newest project.

Today I wanted to share one of the easiest DIY updates that I think I have ever done. Seriously.

When my roommate moved out last year, just before my wedding, she asked me if I wanted this pair of wooden lamps that she had been carting around since college. I say ‘yes’ without asking to see said lamps, figuring I could find some use for them in our new home. Fast-forward a few weeks. I’m in the process of moving myself and I find these very unattractive wood and brassy lamps with the pleated shades on them (not shown in picture) in our basement. I call my roommate up and say “hey you left some stuff down here, do you still want it?, etc” She responds by reminding me that I said I wanted the lamps. So THESE are the lamps. Ok. Cool. Let’s make it work. 

Pinterest-inspired TV Console

At the beginning of this year, my husband and I decided to do a small redesign in our living room. It started when a good friend of mine told me about a huge sale at RUGSUSA. We had been wanting to get a new rug for the room and the sale seemed like the perfect time, as the rugs were all 75% OFF! (I have since learned that they have this sale about 27 times a year, but regardless the prices were better than anywhere else we had looked). After some deliberation, my husband actually helped me select a white rug with a gray and yellow pattern. 

Not another blogger…

I’ve been toying for some time with the idea of creating my own blog. I know. Shocker. The most recent source that I could find (dating back to 2010), reported that there are over 8 million blogs in the world. Need less to say, there are a lot of blogs out there, covering just about any topic that you might want (or not want) to read about. The ones that I frequent happen to fall mostly in the world of DIY home decor, vegetarian cooking, fashion, and maybe the occasional travel and lifestyle stuff. And these are GOOD blogs with thousands of readers and wonderful writing and photography.

So what do I have to say that could possibly contribute to the global conversation that is going on everyday?

And secondly, what would the blog be about? I’ve tried my hand at blogging in the past. First in college with two of my best friends where we reviewed local restaurants near the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA. That lasted for about 11 posts. After that there were a brief 18 posts in a blog called Truth and Beauty that I started my first year in Grad school that mostly consisted of personal musings about my post college life. Neither were very successful or thematically oriented. And I’m faced with the same problem as I contemplated starting the third…

I know that I’d like to share some of my many DIY, house-related projects, but I also know that I don’t do nearly enough DIY to sustain a whole blog.

My husband and I have also discussed blogging about our many varied culinary adventures. For those that you know us well most dinners end of being a nondescript mix of cooked vegetables and some combination of spices. Might not be a big crowd pleaser as far as food blogs go.

I’ve also thought about sharing about my work as a family therapist. Our culture is inundated with self-help and prescriptive messages about happiness and wholeness. I’m not sure that I bring anything new to the conversation, but I have some things that I’d like to share for anyone that would listen.

So that, along with some spontaneous stories about our newly-married, working, playing, eating, traveling, thrifting life North of Boston, is probably what you can expect to find here.

So let’s see how it goes…