The Hits and Mrs. of DIYing Your Wedding Dress
I tend to run on the cheap side of frugal, so when I got engaged I knew I wanted to keep my wedding budget under $10,000 while still inviting just about everyone we knew.
I had two major DIY projects that truly paid off: my wedding dress and the picnic blankets for the reception. And then there were several other projects that turned out fine, but ultimately weren’t necessary for the big day.
(All Wedding Photos Courtesy: Picture Perfect Photography)
I had originally hoped to make my wedding dress from scratch but couldn’t find a pattern that really had what I was looking for. Instead I perused the racks of secondhand stores on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles and found a bohemian lace number that was definitely not my style but had the right structure for what I envisioned.
While I was contemplating making my dress, I started to stockpile what ended up being about $100 worth of lace I found online.
Once I got the dress home, I stuck it on my dress form and began contemplating. And cutting. The sleeves came off immediately. I cut them into little cap sleeves that were eventually overlaid by hand-applied lace. Then the collar went. I gave the selvage a simple roll under while I thought out my big move – the back.
The reason that this dress was perfect as a starter piece was because it opened and closed in the front. I could cut as much or as little as I wanted in the back and I would be fine.
I started out cutting a little and applying lace around the edges. That did not work. So I cut more. And more. Until the back was very open. At this point in order to keep the cap sleeve in place I added a pearl necklace to the back of the gown as a shoulder strap.
Once I was happy with the back I turned my attention to the front, cutting it way down. By the time I finished, the entire bodice of the dress was covered in a layer of new lace. I added small pearl buttons down the front, a crystal and silver flower pendant from the craft store to each strap/sleeve, and some hook and eyes inside the closure to keep the snaps safely in place and prevent a truly tragic wardrobe malfunction.
When all was said and done, I had a dress that was completely my style, fit perfectly, and didn’t break the bank.
Here’s the cost breakdown:
Dress: $60
Lace: $100
Pendants: $8/each
Buttons and other notions: $10
Total: about $186
My second grand DIY success was also textile based: 10 picnic quilts. Our original idea was to have a picnic-style reception with blankets all over and low crates as tables. We chose a “down home family reunion”-style destination wedding at Cunningham Cabin in Wyoming, Grand Teton National Park, with about 85 guests attending. The date was June 14, 2014.
Then it hailed on the morning of our wedding day.
Instead of being picnic quilts they became smores pit quilts, and family snuggled up by a huge fire and enjoyed them anyway.
The quilts were inspired by my aunt Nancy, a tremendous quilter and former leader of her quilting circle. She gifted me with yards and yards of fabric remnants from her many projects, as well as a few very large pieces that I ended up using as backing for my slightly undersized quilts.
I am not much of a quilter so I kept my designs basic. I didn’t want them all to look alike, and when you are working with scraps, uniformity is unrealistic.
I also kept the pieces I was working with fairly large. Half of the quilts were a basic “jelly roll” design where you cut a large number of strips to size and sew them end to end until you have what would look like a jelly roll if it were all rolled up. You then cut them down to the width you want your bottom row to be. You keep cutting until your whole “roll” is gone and you have enough pieces to make the size of quilt you want.
I double-checked this by laying them out on my bed as I cut them. It sounds complicated but it was very easy and looked good. Another 3 quilts worked with strips of varying widths featuring center pieces that were similar colors capped off on both ends by fabric of an entirely different color.
I whipped out the tops of the quilts fairly quickly and thought I was almost done. I was wrong. There is an art and patience required to properly laying out a quilt, and then tacking and edging it. I improved but I never got fast. This project was time consuming so I wouldn’t recommend it for someone planning a short engagement.
(On a side note, the best part about this project was being able to work on part of it while curled up on the couch with my fiancé.)
The quilts were a big hit. At the end of the night, all but one of them were sent home with guests as a special favor for those willing to brave the Wyoming night. Including Aunt Nancy.
Fabric: free!
Batting: $100 (mostly on sale)
Thread: less than $10 (bargain shopping at Michael Levine Loft)
Total: $110
On the flower front I knew that there was no way I was going to spend $350 on a bouquet. There are a lot of interesting ideas on the web about alternative bouquets – paper, brooches, buttons, ribbons.
I decided to go with a combination. I crafted flowers out of ribbon and floral wire. I also incorporated a money clip that had belonged to my grandfather as well as other delightful sparkly things. I gathered all of the flowers and bling together and then covered the stems in green felt to add bulk and make it more comfortable to hold. I covered the handle with lace and tied a ribbon over the top of that.
I also built the boutonnieres out of the scraps from my dress and a couple other wedding craft related fabrics.
Ribbon: $34
Notions (glue, buttons, floral wire, felt): $5
Sparkly things: free! (all from my jewelry box)
Total: $39
Right before the wedding I started to get antsy about favors and welcome bags and all of the other accoutrements that wedding websites keep trying to sell you on. I also found myself alone in my house with lots of supplies and no fiancé to keep me sane and project-free for a day.
I decided to make custom wedding welcome bag “postcards” with a Grand Teton style illustration on the front and wedding details on the back. I tried a few different types of paper trying to find something sturdy that would feed through my printer/scanner. I failed.
Ultimately I bought some blue slightly shiny paper that I printed all of the “day of” details on then cut that to size and photo mounted it on the back of postcards I had block printed. The postcards were 5x7 cut down from a few sheets of 36” posterboard. I already had the block, cutting devices, and printing ink. I decided to also try acrylic paint as a medium. The paint was a little more trouble than it was worth. I went with a very simple 2 color print and then drew in details with charcoal and color pencils.
Posterboard: $6
Paper: $10
Paint: $5
Total: $21
I did a number of smaller projects as well. Because the weather was unpredictable and it sprinkled with rain randomly throughout the evening, many of my smaller decorative touches never saw the light of day. However, they were easy, cute, and affordable so I’ll mention them anyway.
Bunting. It’s not just for babies any more. Some of the scraps from the quilt project were too small, so I cut small triangular flags out of it. I sewed them to some of the edging lace I bought for my dress but didn’t end up using. Easy as pie. Also, since it was basically using leftovers, I’m not going to count it as costing anything.
Heart streamers – I found a tutorial for heart streamers made by hole-punching paint chips with a special heart hole punch, sewing them together in a long string and voila! Done. I had a lot of trouble with that particular method. My sewing machine just didn’t want to keep the stitches between hearts neat. So I turned to my trusty glue gun and some ribbon I bought for $.50 roll. I used these streamers to decorate the front porch railings of the cabins my guests were staying in.
Paint chips: free
Ribbon: $4 total (8 rolls of 10yds)
Heart Punch: $15
Glue: less than $5
Total: $24
Pinwheels – Another easy online tutorial. I found a cute pack of vintage style paper at the craft store and knew I could find a use for it. I ended up making a cute “Just Married” sign, some more bunting, pinwheels to put on tables for the kids, and more solid pinwheels to hang from the trees.
Paper - $3
Notions (straws, pins, buttons, yarn) - $10
Total: $13
Wine bottle vases – Pretty self explanatory. We collected bottles (mostly from apple cider) and attempted the yarn/acetone/fire bottle cutting method. We achieved varying levels of success. Ultimately I got frustrated with doing this the cheap way and bought a real bottle cutting kit that my husband mastered.
Once the bottles were cut down to vases, I sanded the edges to make them safe and then decorated them with more of my handy dandy lace, ribbon and buttons. This project overall was frustrating more frequently than it was rewarding but it was nice to just be able to pull off the lace and toss the “vases” in the recycling and not have to haul them home. The only thing we bought for this project was the bottle cutting kit which cost about $20.
Overall, I am really happy with how the wedding projects turned out. The projects that I really poured myself into were appreciated and treasured. My groom, the handsome Jack Colwell, was really supportive of all of my projects or at least faked it really well. Before I would take on anything new I’d approach him with the idea and see how much pause it gave him. He never vetoed anything and he even caught the DIY bug himself and made “stash boxes” out of vintage books for the groomsmen.
And we did stay under our $10,000 budget.
But if I had it to do all over again, I would pick fewer projects. I would try not to make everything.
The decorations we didn’t use weren’t missed. It was cold so you never saw the corsages I made the moms, because they were under jacket sleeves.
The welcome bags were nice but not really necessary. Some of the easiest projects were the most memorable (kids really do go nuts for pinwheels).
What is really most important to us is that a) we are married and b) it was definitely OUR wedding.
