DIY Wedding: The Venue

8. A great way to save some money is to have your ceremony & reception at the same location. This way you only have to pay for the rental of one building. (You could also consider asking friends & family if they would host the wedding on their property; that way you might not have to pay ANY rental fee!)

My husband and I both love the outdoors and have been on countless backpacking, hiking, camping & road trips. It was a no brainer for us to have an outdoor ceremony

We knew we wanted to get married under a large tree (preferably oak, but we would take what we could get). We ended up with the perfect venue: a small farm with a large pasture and a very large tree in the back.

The ceremony would be in the back pasture by the tree and the reception would be closer in toward the barn (there was an area of lawn with nice sod between the barn and the pasture). Everything was to be outside: the ceremony, the dinner, the dance, everything.

Well, everything except the dessert table and a slide show that were set up inside with a few high-top tables for hors d'oeuvres. The barn also had a beautiful chandelier in the loft that I am ashamed we didn't get more use out of except for a few photo-ops. Keep an eye out for my DIY Wedding: Photographers post where I will include pictures of me & my hus dancing under the chandelier.

(Warning: I would only recommend having an outdoor wedding to folks who are laid back and calm, & ones that have a definite rain-plan. The stress that comes with planning an outdoor wedding can be dangerous. If you chose to plan an outdoor wedding please do your best to avoid becoming a bride or groomzilla, or even worse, a blubbery mess of anxiety and hostility that rises and falls with the weather forecast.)

*As a side-note the weather forecast for our wedding day was 70% chance of thunderstorms. Luckily for us, it stormed in most surrounding areas and our wedding was perfectly overcast the entire day.

DIY Wedding: Wedding Cake

I guess this could technically go under the catering section, but I will make it its own entry.

6. Make your own wedding cake (or have someone you know make your cake).

Why? We know plenty of amazing bakers, including my mother who has been making wedding cakes for friend and family weddings ever since I was little, and my husband's step-mother who makes amazing cheesecake. I knew that I would get exactly what I wanted if I asked my mom to make our cake, and it was meaningful to have my mother and mother-in-law be the ones to bake our wedding cake(s).

Catering help setting up the dessert table

How do you DIY? More goes into decided what you want for your wedding cake than you might expect. You need to decide what kind of cake: vanilla, chocolate, marble, red velvet, shortcake, the list goes on... After you decide what the inside is going to be you need to decide what kind of frosting will cover it and if you want any flowers, toppers or other extras to be included in the design. Once you get the details out of the way the rest is pretty easy. Ask someone to bake it and tell them when it needs to be done by.

My husband is not a big fan of regular cake (I think he's crazy), so we knew we wanted his step-mom to make her famous strawberry cheesecake for us. However, cheesecake can be a difficult thing to serve for an entire wedding (especially if the wedding is outside and there is no kitchen available aka no refrigeration on-hand for massive amounts of delicious cheesecake). The rest of our guests were served equally delicious strawberry shortcake.

Here we are cutting into our cake. 

Tip: Remember to bring a cake knife or you might end up using the serving knife to cut your cake!

We had a dessert table set up to display the individual pieces of shortcake (yes, those are DIY cake stands made from candlesticks and china!) and when it was time for cake to be served our catering help dished the strawberry sauce and whipped cream onto each piece for our guests.

My sister-in-law is an artist and she made marionette doll replicas of us as bride & groom. Notice how detailed she is... right down to the flower crown and red bow tie! (For more art by Sarah Trembley visit her Etsy store. She makes amazing leather purses & wallets!) 

DIY Wedding: Catering

5. Make your own food & wedding cake (or have someone you know do it for you). Caution: Not all wedding venues allow you to bring in your own caterer. Make sure you ask before you plan on bringing in your own food.

Why? Catering can be expensive. You're not just paying for the cost of the food, but the preparation time, cooking, serving, making sure food dishes stay filled, clean up, etc. Why not save a little bit of money by having someone you know prepare the appetizers, desserts, or main entree. Or better yet, all three! By having someone you know cater, you might be able to get away with only paying for the cost of food! (And a nice thank you gift for the one doing all the work.)


How do you DIY? My mom loves cooking and preparing food for events and has taken on catering as a bit of a side-hobby. My lovely neighbors have also worked in the catering business (they helped cater my sisters wedding back in 2009).  However, even if your mom doesn't have any catering experience there might be someone else you know who does: neighbors, relatives, friends of friends? It never hurts to ask around.

The first step is to decide on a menu. My husband and I wanted to have chicken and steak shish-kabobs, but we weren't sure what kind of sauce we wanted the meat marinated in. We easily incorporated the menu-selecting process into our everyday lives by having dinner with my parents and trying out different recipes. We tried out half a dozen different recipes (and styles of cooking) and marked the recipes we liked best. We also had plenty of hors d'oeuvre and wine tasting parties to help finalize the menu. Yum.

Three of the biggest issues with catering yourself are 1. finding volunteers to help serve 2. making sure you have enough people to help prepare the food, and 3. transportation.

 My mom had a lot of her friends from church volunteer to help. There were also a few family-friends of my parents that didn't quite make the guest list that were able to help with the food. As far as transportation goes, I suggest you try to prepare and cook the food as close to your wedding venue as possible, because it'll make hauling everything over to the reception area a lot easier.

Early on we decided we wanted to serve the food to our guests ourselves. We had the "catering help" set up the buffet style tables and get the food ready to serve and when it was time the entire wedding party put on aprons and gloves and began to serve.

 As a gesture of gratitude, it was a great way for us give thanks to our guests for coming, and be able to greet those guests that didn't want to wait in the greeting line after the ceremony. (For those that did wait in the greeting line, it was nice to see them a second time! It is surprisingly difficult to try to talk to everyone you invite to your wedding.)

DIY Wedding: Flowers

4. Grow your own flowers!

Why? My mom has two green thumbs, and I have loved watching her flowers bloom every year since I was a child. In fact, over half of my mom's entire front yard is a garden. It just made sense to grow the majority of the flowers instead of buying all of them from a florist.

How do you DIY? First you need to choose a flower that will be in season during your Big Day. I knew I wanted zinnias so this was easy for me (I have always loved their variety of color and detail). Next you need to recruit everyone you know to plant seeds. Tip: It would be a nice gesture to purchase the seeds for the gardening volunteers. It saves them time, and you'll be sure they have the correct flowers germinating in their soil.

My mom planted zinnias in more than one of her gardens, and my sister who lives on a 5-acre hobby farm only planted zinnias that summer. Both of my mother-in-laws planted multiple pots of zinnia seeds. I even got my brother who was away at college to plant a pot of seeds. It was an all-around group effort!

We had a few snack tables around the reception area as well. We used green and white hydrangeas on these tables.

While growing your own flowers is a great way to get people involved and save a little chunk of money, it's very important to make sure your flower calculations are correct. There is a possibility that the flowers won't bloom in time. There is also the possibility that you won't have enough flowers. Luckily, we ordered some "filler" flowers (in addition to growing them) to fill in the extra vases.

In addition to "filler flowers," we also ordered the bouquets and the boutineers for the bridal party.  (Although, if you have the right tools and skills it would be very easy to make these yourself.)

Here are some close-up shots of the bouquets and boutineers:

Tip: Make sure you set aside flowers for the flower girl to carry down the aisle. This is one detail we forgot and my sister (MOH) snatched a few flowers from random vases as we lined up to start the processional. 

DIY Wedding: Centerpieces

Caution: This DIY project might not save you money.

3. Put together your own table decorations.

Why? Like I mentioned earlier, my husband and I are both English majors. We wanted to have vases of flowers on top of books for decorations, and it's pretty difficult to rent book-themed centerpieces from party rental stores. This DIY project most definitely did not help save us money, but we were able to create awesome table decorations that fit our tastes/the feel of the wedding.

How do you DIY? First you need to decide what kind of books you are looking for: vintage, poetry, specific authors, etc... Early on we decided each table would be assigned a famous author (instead of table numbers). We compiled a list of all the authors we wanted, then did some math to figure out how many tables we were going to need. From there we were able to trim the initial list down to 20 or so authors. (I can't remember exactly how many tables we had...oops!)

We knew we needed at least 5 books on each table in order to achieve the look we wanted (4 seemed too few to have a full (and put-together) look). Thus began to search for 100 books! (5 from each author). Luckily, we are both English majors, so we had a handful of books in our own personal libraries. Even more luckily, I have a cousin who works at a Half Price Books and she was able to keep an eye out for cool copies of the books we were so desperately in need of.

Books are beautiful lined up side-by-side on a shelf, but having a stack of 5 books centered on a white table cloth wasn't enough to satisfy this bride. We decided to use burlap squares to center the books on the tables. (Tip: Never rent burlap, it's outrageously overpriced. You can buy packs of burlap bags at Fleet Farm or other gardening centers for dirt cheap. Plus, you get to cut them to the size/shape you want!) The burlap alone still left the centerpieces feeling "flat," and at that point we decided to use doilies to spruce things up.

We collected the vases (all shapes and sizes, the more variety the better) from thrift stores and garage sales. We even used some mason jars as vases (we collected them to use for the drinking glasses and had quite a few extra).

The last step to completing our centerpieces was to search the internet to find and print portraits of each author (some photographs, some paintings), and purchase small frames to nestle each author between the books and the flower vases on each table.

Because the head table was a different shape we didn't have room for all the books. Instead of using square burlap cloths we used a long burlap runner across the entire length of the table (running all the way to the ground on both ends). To conserve on doilies, we put them under every other flower vase on the head table. (P.S. my talented mother-in-law crocheted two of the doilies for the head table, one of them is in the picture below.)

During the ceremony my husband read an excerpt from Song of the Open Road by Walt Whitman and I read an excerpt from Walden by Henry David Thoreau. We didn't have books on the head table, but we did have these author's photographs in front of our table settings.

DIY Wedding: Invitations

I will admit, this next step is a lot of work (and the particular style of invitation we went with was even more work to do ourselves, but it was well worth it fiscally and creatively!)

2. Make your invitations yourself. Design them, perforate them, bind them. Even print them yourself if you want to! Did you know you can sew through paper?

Why? Hiring someone to make your invitations can get spendy, and if you are the creative type it is far more satisfying to have created something as important as your wedding invitations from scratch. My husband and I are both English majors so we decided it would be appropriate to create a miniature book to announce our engagement and invite our friends and family to join in the celebration of our marriage.

We chose a dark brown card-stock for the cover (80 lb. paper), and a light cream colored paper for the interior pages (20 lb. paper). P.S. This is the awesome tree illustration that my super talented brother-in-law Manny Trembley created for us.

How do you DIY? Having a bit of graphic design background is necessary for this DIY. My husband spent weeks designing the invitations using Adobe InDesign software. We collaborated to get the wording just right and had the privilege of being able to ask our former graphic design professor for some critique on the design.  Also, my awesome brother-in-law (mentioned above) is a graphic illustrator and graciously designed the main illustration for the cover (the tree), the detailed leaf that appears multiple times throughout the invite, and the map on the back side of the directions. 

As you can see, it was daylight when we started this task, and it covered the entire kitchen table.

To DIY perforate paper all you need is a sewing machine. I thought this was so cool when I first saw it on pinterest that I had to try it! All you have to do is run the paper through the machine without any thread in the needle. Pretty neat. Also, this allowed our guests to easily tear out the directions and RSVPs without ripping them. 

Of course, when you are taking on big DIY projects it is always a good idea to recruit willing family members to help. My mother helped sew all 250 invitations together. She is the #1 Nice Lady. My older sister (and MOH) volunteered quite a few hours to the process as well. Tips: to increase the speed of production sew continuously through as many invitations as you can by feeding them through the machine one after another. Once you are finished you can and snip the connecting threads.  

Woah, how did it get dark so fast? Oh, yeah, it seriously took all day to assemble these invitations. By this point I had to leave to babysit, and my dedicated husband stayed behind to finish the process. 

To view a complete PDF of our invitations click on the link below. 

The Invitation Masterpiece

A few things to note: 

• The cover page is white, but we printed on dark brown card-stock to make it look more "book like"
• Yes, we designed a husband/wife publishing logo (the WE inside a book)
• The pages are displayed in spreads (each page was folded down the middle)
• See that cool vine under each chapter? That's an exact imitation of my wedding band-- a vine that encircles my finger with diamonds on each leaf
• We omitted the address for obvious reasons
• Yes, the tree on the last page of the RSVP is intentionally upside down. When torn on the perforation and folded it creates a sweet little card
• Not shown in the PDF or in the pictures is the return envelope we rubber cemented to the back inside page of each invitation

DIY Wedding: Table Settings

Because we decided to have such a short engagement (only 5 months!) we needed to get our wedding-planning butts in gear straight away. During this time I was also taking thirteen credits worth of summer classes. That meant most of the work and planning fell onto my husband's workload. I'm lucky he is so gracious and diligent.

We are definitely a "do-it-yourself" kind of couple and this wedding turned out to be the master of DIY Weddings. You might be wondering how many aspects of a wedding you can truly DIY, and why we felt the need to do it that way. Here is a list of items and our reasons for doing it ourselves and how we did it:

1. Buy mismatching dishes and silverware instead of renting. By actually buying plates and silverware we were able to cut down the cost enormously.

Why? First of all, we loved the idea of having an outdoor wedding with mismatching dinnerware for all of our guests. I came to think of the wedding as having a vintage garden feel to it. However, there is a more economical reason for doing this: the cost of renting is outrageous.

Renting Costs:

• 12" Dinner Plate, white, $1.75
• Fork, $0.35
• Spoon, $0.35
• Knife, $0.35

That equals $2.80 per guest. We invited 200 guests. The plates and silverware alone would have cost us $560 (and we would have to return them)!   

How do you DIY?  We started out by stopping at any (and every) garage sale we saw signs for. I stopped at one sale and purchased a dozen spoons. As I was paying I explained to the woman running the sale that I was collecting mismatching silverware for my wedding. She then told me she had a whole bin full of mismatching pieces she didn't put out because she couldn't imagine anyone wanting it. I bought 50-60 pieces at that sale alone for only $5.00. (I guess it pays to be a yapper!)

To help lessen the workload for ourselves we took to asking friends and family for help whenever possible.  Because these items came from so many different places I don't have an exact amount for dollars spent vs. renting but we had very strict budget guidelines.

Buying Guidelines:

• Dinner Plate, <$0.50
• Fork, <$0.25
• Spoon, <$0.25
• Knife, <$0.25

At most, this equals $1.25 per guest. Multiply by 200 and that's $250. By having DIY table settings we cut those rentals by more than half (and saved $310).

It is also important to mention that we did not rent glassware. We have a lot of canners in our family and were able to borrow as many mason jars as we needed. However, we did buy mason jars with handles for our bridal party to keep and my husband and I used mason jar wine glasses (mason jars attached to upside-down glass candlesticks).