When you are a crafter on a budget with a wedding to plan, the Michael’s clearance section and thrift shopping are your friends. I started buying clearance flowers for our wedding well before we were engaged (sorry, not sorry – 90% off can’t be ignored even if you don’t have that ring on your finger quite yet). I had also started collecting tea pots and tea cups, which I knew we would want to integrate into the decor somehow.
Bouquets, flower crowns, centerpieces, wedding favors, boutonnières, corsages, and other decorations to fill the atmosphere… I wanted to make them all and knew I was up to the task!
In the end, it all came together and looked marvelous! I couldn’t be happier with the look and feel of our wedding. We were fortunate to find a venue that complemented our style so well. All I was doing was accentuating and personalizing the space for our day.
The key to obtaining my vision was those flowers. I knew I couldn’t afford a florist to decorate our venue, and I lucked out by founding a bunch of silk flowers on clearance. I bought all of them. And that is what I used on every centerpiece, every wedding favor, every flower crown, every boutonnière and corsage.
Due to my side business, Obnoxious Hats by Lady Woolthief, I spent a lot of time in thrift stores to find thrifted goods to put on hats. That’s how I started building up a massive collection of tea pots and tea cups to use for our centerpieces. I ended up making 10 unique tea pot sculptures to display throughout our venue.
These were actually quite easy to make. I would build the sculpture first, using e6000 glue to secure it all together. Then I spray-painted the sculptures with a few layers of metallic silver spray paint. I wanted them all to feel cohesive and I considered the silver color representative of the “Winter” in the “Spring in Winter” theme. I also did a couple layers of clear coat spray paint to seal it all in and prevent chipping. Lastly, I added the flowers using hot glue. One of the nice thing about decorating with silk flowers is being able to cover up any mistakes made in the spray painting phase! Even with multiple layers of spray paint, I still managed to missed a few spots.
In the end, I kept two of the centerpieces for our house and gave the rest as gifts to our mothers and my bridesmaid’s mothers. I created hand-made cards for each of the gifts with the picture of which centerpiece they could bring home and a note about how much I adored them and their daughter. It is always a special reminder of our wedding when I go to one of their houses and see the centerpieces hanging out.
To complement the teapot sculptures, I also made some adorable Peek-a-Boo Fairy Mason Jars with pictures of us inside. Read up on how to make those here.
An amusing outcome of making all of these tea pot sculptures was that I had a lot of tea pot lids just sitting around. Instead of just throwing them out, I decided to make wedding favors out of them! I ordered these metal wire clips off of Amazon for $11 and had a perfect craft to give to our guests!
On top of the silk flowers, I did splurge a little on having some paper flowers made for the bouquets, corsages, and boutonnières. The beautiful pink flowers for my bouquet was made by Blooming Books and the rest of the paper flowers were made by ThePaperFlower1 on Etsy. They were all pages from Harry Potter and added a little something extra to each of these pieces.
My first attempt at the bridesmaid’s flower crowns was… underwhelming. I had tried going more subtle, but with a business called Obnoxious Hats by Lady Woolthief, I knew I needed to go big or go home. My bridesmaids were all such amazing sports wearing these crowns! They definitely aren’t to everyone’s tastes, but I love bold, colorful, and glittery things! I did go more subtle on my own crown and it is everything I could have wanted and more. It is genuinely one of my favorite things I have ever made.
If you have ever bought silk flowers to use on a project, you know that they don’t just come with the flowers – they come on a plastic stem and often have leaves attached to them. I had been saving the leaves off silk flowers stems for years, hoping one day I would have a project to use them on. Then… it struck me. We could make a runner completely covered in these leaves. This was a huge group effort on the part of my crafting group. It took several nights of 2-3 of us gluing on these leaves individually to get the completed project. But I couldn’t have been happier with how it turned out and how it looks in all of our wedding photos. It truly tied the entire scene together.
Side note: Since our wedding, I have used the runner as a floor for several fantasy photoshoots. This picture also features my flower girls in the dresses they wore in my wedding.
It took over a year of crafting to finish all the projects for the wedding. It was completely worth it. It made the wedding feel so much more personal and… well, mine. We still have many of the projects up around the house as a reminder of our special day. It was just another element that made the day perfect.