DIY Wedding Craft Tutorials

Love is in the air here in the Richmond Craft Mafia, so we'd like to share some easy ways to make your wedding special (and save a little money too!).

Invitations

There are tons of ways to personalize a plain jane store-bought wedding invite kit. Here's what my husband and I did for ours:



Materials:

Printable invitation blanks (there are many various kits available at craft stores and major retailers)

Decorative paper

Stamp & inkpad

Scissors or paper trimmer

Hole punch (they make special-sized ones for scrap-booking brads)

Scrapbooking brads

Instructions:

Follow the printing instructions included with your invite kit. Most kits will come with a template of some sort that you can use with your word-processing software. Make sure to test your invite on plain paper first, as perfect alignment can take a few tries. Leave ample empty space at the top of your invite for the decorative embellishment.

Stamp your image in rows on decorative paper and then cut them out. You can also measure & pre-cut your paper if you wish. If you have access to a paper trimmer, this will go much faster than trimming with scissors and give you a lovely straight line. You can also use an exacto blade and a ruler for a clean sharp edge.

Align your paper cut-out in the top center of your invite and use the hole-punch to puncture both the embellishment and the invite at the same time.

Attach the paper cut-out with scrapbooking brads. (If you buy extra brads, you can easily coordinate your RSVP cards with your invites by putting a brad in the corner of each one.)

Take a look around the craft store and get creative! I bought a new stamp and a jar of paper flower confetti and made all kinds of variations for my TV spot:

Just remember that whatever you design, keep it pretty simple, because you'll have to make one for every guest.

Boutonnieres

If you're feeling moderately crafty, you can also make your own boutonnieres. We made one for everyone in our family wedding party and presented them at our rehears

al dinner, rather than buying everyone a silly engraved thing (that no one really wants anyway). Everybody loved them! we had a fall wedding, so we incorporated acorns and other seasonal items to make each one unique. Since it's spring, I've chosen some springier materials for this demo.

Materials:

Artificial flowers & greenery (look for paper-wrapped w

ire stems rather than plastic)

Floral tape

Ribbon

Corsage pins

Scissors

Wire-cutters

1. Separate flower and greenery bunches into individual pieces. Leave a few inches of stem to work with.
2. Start with a large flat leaf or bed of greenery.
3. Select a focal flower and intertwine its stem w ire with that of the leaf.
4. Add a few smaller accent flowers or berries by wrapping their stem wires around the main stem.
5. Double up or cut off any excess so that stem is about 2”-3” long.
6. Wrap stem in floral tape.
7. Finish it off with a bow (optional)and a corsage pin.