Wedding DIY Love Letter Wine Box Wood Burning

 When I first met my husband, he had a 3 slot wine bottle box that he'd gotten from a winery somewhere. I think it used to say Savannah. We kept the box when we moved and when I told him about alternate unity ceremonies for our wedding, he was really interested in the love letter wine box ceremony. I looked online for boxes and was shocked at the prices. I don't know how to carve, but I had the idea to do wood burning/etching on the box. I knew that I wanted the back to be our monogram theme that had been everywhere in the wedding. Although I designed the logo, hand drawing it would have been a disaster.

I printed out a large letter size copy of my monogram. Now obviously I can't see through the box to trace so I had to make my transfer by shading the back of the monogram. 

 It's best if you have charcoal, but a good drawing pencil can do the job as well. Shade the entire back (well only the parts that have the shape you want to transfer).

Using a pen or pencil, trace the outline of the image onto the wood. Then use the wood burner to trace your outline and burn the design into the wood. Make sure to cover areas you want to be darker and keep the heat lighter on the areas you want to shade lighter. 

 For the front of the box he had a family crest that I thought would be perfect. I also wanted our initials on each door and behind each door would be the glass for when we open the box.

 The method is the same as was done to the back. Print out the image, shade the back and trace.

The main difference between the front and back was that the front had color to it. I used color pencils to color in between the line and used a piece of tissue to rub in and even out the color.

My baby installed two locks on the front before the wedding day. We each got a set of each key for safe keeping. I should put that in the safe.

Here's the box opened.

 You can see the opened box at the end of aisle. Our mothers walked in the glasses and placed them on our respective sides. Within the week leading up to the wedding, we each wrote our letter to one another and after the preacher performed the ceremony, we placed them in the box without reading. We changed up the tradition slightly by adding that we want to do a recurring wine box every 5 years.

It currently sits at the top of one of our book cases in the study.

DIY Wedding Flower Petal Aisle Runner

This project was completed with the help of 5 Superman movies, numb butt, trigger finger syndrome, several bags of flower petals and a few large sticks of glue. I also used several feet of tulle (80 feet total). The project included some early lessons learned. I'd seen a tutorial that said it would be fast to use adhesive spray and place the petals on top. The two cans I got was a waste of funds, IMO. I would have done better to just go the hot glue gun route right from the start. To make it easier to pull up the tulle without tearing, I use a cookie sheet flipped over as my work area. The silver and blue petals were all dumped into basket and shaken so that I could randomly pull and glue. I kept the white ones separate so that I could use them as the back drop.

 After each pan length would cool, I'd gently pry up the tulle from the pan and start the next section.

Randomly I placed the silver and baby blue petals all over the whites. I also made sure that the petals overhung the tulle so that the final produce actually spanned about 8 inches.

 I liked looking at my progress as the aisle runner took shape. But slowly I started to run out of space.

 The plastic on the floor was my first failed attempt using the adhesive spray. All I got for that was a sticky plastic and time wasted.

 When I ran out of space, I rolled up the finished portion and kept working. I completed everything over a few days, but took breaks in between. And Superman can be quite distracting. Even the bad ones like with Richard Pryor as a computer geek.

 At the end of the long hallway and into our bedroom, I placed a piece of tape at the 40 foot mark and as my roll increased, I'd go out and unrolled it out and measure.

 After nearly 18 hours total (with breaks in between), I completed two 40 feet by 6" role of flower petals.

The final product in the church filled me with pride. Since one of my MIL's coworker was so generous in letting us borrow some of her columns and artificial flowers for the church (you can sort of see them at the end of the aisle), I gave her the runners as a trade. Initially I'd planned to sell it, but the trade was worth it and we saved a bundle.

Wedding DIY: Foil Envelope Lining for Invitation

Here's a quickie tutorial. I ordered my invitations and envelopes from Vistaprint. The invitations were beautiful, however the default envelopes that came with them were really thin. 

I saw somewhere in the Wedding Wire forum where someone did the lining with colored paper. I wanted to keep with my silver and ice blue theme so I got a silver gift wrap and cut to the shape of the envelop. Sorry I'm missing some pictures, but hopefully you can get the gist. 

First I cut a rectangle the size of the envelope using my mat with ruler, I then sliced off a tiny bit so it could fit in the envelope. Then I put the rectangle in the envelop and folded it to the shape of the envelope flap. Since it was my prototype, I didn't care if it was crinkled. I used that and my paper cutter to mimic the sample and cut all that I needed (110).

After cutting up all of my lining, I stuffed them into the envelopes.  

 Then I used glue stick to stick the flap of the lining to the flap of the envelope. I didn't bother to glue the inner part of the lining. Placing the invitations in there kept it in place. Yes this cost me time, but I had that during my planning and it saved me some more dollars.

Wedding DIY Stamped Coctail Napkins

I wanted personalized napkins with the monogram/logo I'd designed for the wedding. I went online searching for someone to do the stamp and found a website http://www.rubberstamps.net/ to do my custom job. For about $15 I got my 1.5"X3" rubber stamp including the shipping. I picked up an ink pad (permanent) from Joann's on sale an used it and I was ready to stamp.



 With a movie ready, I stamped over 200 cocktail napkins that I'd picked up from Ikea. $1.99 for 100 in a pack. I purchased 2 packs. I used regular paper to do a couple of stamps at first to make sure there was no blotches, and then proceded. As you can see to the left of the two lower images, I'd lay out 3 napkins and stamp, stamp, stamp, stack and repeat. I made sure to apply even pressure. I had to reapply everytime to make sure I had a clear image for each napkin.

 This was the final look at the wedding. The worked perfectly and there was no running of ink onto anything or anyone. Athough my arm was tired by the end, I got a lot of use out of that stamp in many other areas of the wedding.



Wedding Gift Card Box DIY

When I ordered the rosette fabric for the godet and train for my wedding dress, I made sure to get extra of the rosette for other areas in the decor. One area was our gift card box,. I went to Ross and got a large hat box. I cut a 1" X 8" rectangle into the top of the box.

 Then I covered the lid and the bottom separately using fabric glue. In hindsight, I would have used hot glue gun, but the fabric glue work.

 First I cut a circle a little larger than the top of the lid and then made a slit in the same area that the rectangle was cut from. I didn't cut a rectangle, I wanted the excess fabric to fold around the hole.

 It worked best for me to cut a rectangle the entire circumference of the box and about 4 inches taller. Then I wrapped the fabric around the cylinder and then folded in the excess fabric (about an inch) inside the box and underneath (the remaining excess). I didn't bother to cover the exposed piece. I also cut out triangles out of the bottom to make sure the excess could lay flat.

 I used a blue ribbon around the lid and and 3 adhesive rhinestone usually used for scrap books or invitation decorations.

For a final touch, I got artificial grapes and when my then fiance was stray painting the bottles for the centerpieces, he sprayed the grapes silver for me. I used hot glue to adhere it to the top of the lid. The lid was a really tight fit because of the fabric. I liked it because not anyone could just go and pull off the lid and take a card away. It held up perfectly well for both wedding ceremonies and was large enough to fit every card that we got. 

Wine Bottles Peel and Paint

This was a fun but dangerous project. When we decided to go with the grape and wine them, it was partially because I'd seen some postings on Pinterest of painted wine bottles. I loved them and thought that would be such an affordable way to have center pieces.

First I asked my friends and family to please give me their empty wine bottles. My mother-in-law was awesome help. She contacted her book club and since they were avid wine drinkers and one of them was dating a guy with a wine store, I had more wine bottles than I needed in no time. With the bottles she got and the ones my then fiance had emptied, I had over 90 bottles in various sizes and colors. Then I had to figure out how to peel them all.

I looked online and some methods said to soak the bottles in hot water and then peel. That was not working out so well for me. Another said to bake the bottles and then peel the labels. that worked for some bottles, but what really worked was a combination of the method. I dipped the bottles in a sink full of water and left about a teaspoonful of water in each bottle and placed them in the oven and set the oven to 350F.

 Note the oven was cold when I placed the bottles in. I cooked the bottles from cold to hot. When the oven was at temperature, I let it stay in there for another 5 minutes the removed and peeled the labels off. The adhesive was loose and the labels peeled off easily for most of the bottles. For those that were difficult, I scrubbed it with a scour pad to removed all the residue.

By the way, this project took a while to complete. Since I started the peeling process in October, I had to wait for another warm day for my now husband to paint the bottles.

 He also cut off the bottom of a third of the bottles to be used for the artificial candles. Then before he painted those I used painter's tape to make different styles on the bottles to allow the light from the candles through.

 Using a cardboard box as his paint station, he spray painted a third of the bottles in blue, the other third and the ones with tape were all done in silver.

 Following the Christmas Holidays, we went to Michael's and bought out all of their silver tings at the 70% discount and used them to stage the centerpieces for the reception.

 For the final look at the wedding, we placed the bottles on a mirror and used corks with slices in them to put the table numbers at each table. If there's anything I could have done differently, I would have maybe used ostrich feathers for the fillers. Something more eye catching, but I still loved the final look.