Wedding DIY

Remember how I was going to make these stupid lanterns for wedding decor, so I could say I at least made one craft?  Yeah so that's out.  Why?  They weren't especially hideous or anything, but they just weren't fun to make either.  They were annoying to make and the thought of having to make 50-100 of them is stressful.  So they're out.  We'll buy a bunch of tea light holders from Ikea/the dollar store and sell them on Kijiji after the wedding.

I've talked before about one of my favourite blogs, A Practical Wedding.  Something really awesome about A Practical Wedding is that its creator, Meg Keene, wrote an awesome awesome amazing book also called A Practical Wedding.  I think everyone who ever plans to have, be in, or even attend a wedding sometime in their life should read it.  It's just got incredibly practical, sane advice and insights about weddings that most people don't think about, or stress out about because they think you have to do it, but the book is like "you don't have to do that!" or "here's why this situation is stressful and here's how to deal with it" so it's awesome.  Definitely the best wedding-related literature out there, not that I've read a lot, but I can't imagine anything better.

SO, how did I get from lantern to book?  Here's some great advice from the book about DIY projects, which are totally all the rage at weddings these days:  don't do them if they're not fun.  Do them if they ARE fun for you, or if you can't afford not to, but don't do them if they're going to stress you out and you can afford to pay for the alternative.

Brilliant and simple advice, right?  Duh, really, but wedding culture is a weird one to navigate.  You want to make your wedding your own, so you want to do nice crafty things... but you have to realize when it's time to Say No to Crafts.  And that time is when you hate them.

We're taking the advice and still doing some things that ARE fun for us.  For Brahm, that's designing the invitations (in Adobe InDesign, no gluing ribbons onto 5 layers of coloured paper for us thanks) and wedding website.  For me, it's growing the flowers and making the floral "arrangements" (throwing a few flowers into a vase or taping them into a bouquet).

Obviously I'm great at growing tomatoes and herbs and okay at growing other random vegetables, but I've never really been interested in growing flowers until now.  But thinking about it more, there's a whole bunch of cool stuff to learn about growing flowers for cutting which I'm really excited to learn - when to cut the flowers and how long to hydrate them in water so they'll be good in bouquets, etc.

I've got about 20 bucks' worth of heirloom sunflower and other good cutting flower seeds, and all the "vases" were donated (that's a surprise for later though), so if I can pull this off our entire wedding flower and centrepiece budget will be under 50 bucks, and extremely environmentally friendly.  Sunflowers are also some of the easiest plants to grow too, so I'm hoping for success!