Kira Grogg · this is what i do

I got married recently -- two month anniversary (monthiversary? mensiversary?) today! woooo!

I figured I'd post some of our super awesome (read: frugal) decorations. What I never really considered before creating our wedding was that while individual items might not be expensive, once you need 12 (one for each table) or 100 (one for each guest), the costs really add up!  So there was a lot of DIY and taking advantage of sales/cheap stores. Our goal was to spend just enough to create a festive atmosphere and make sure everyone had fun. I think goal was accomplished. 

Top view of the red table center piece.  Our caterer did a great job of combing our decorations with their materials.  For the centerpieces we bought large glass bowls and battery powered candles each for ~$2 from Ikea, batteries at $11 for 48 (Maxwell brand), scarlet tissue paper, and a huge $4 bag of marble chips from Lowes to add volume and hold the candle in place. Apples were bought from Aldi for less than 25cents each, and origami flowers were created from silver foil origami paper and a lot of double sided tape. I bought 6" and 4" but ended up going with 6" cut into forths for each "petal". The 4" paper was much too thin. That was by far the most labor intensive part of decorating.  There was lots of watching of HGTV while folding. The tissue paper was going to be made into puffy flowers, but I ran out of time so it just got crumpled up under the apples. Centerpieces were placed on silver doilies and then on the caterer's napkin. 

Here is a picture of the purple version with the candle lit. The candles turn on and off by a quick shake, which was pretty cool.   

 Another view of the centerpiece with the table number.  (The top view of the centerpieces is much cooler than the side view.) The table numbers were thick sparkly-white craft paper with the number written in silvery ink using a gel roll pen. They were propped up in a wire stand stuck into an apple.  Yes, we had apples for the next month.

Final table decoration were battery powered tea lights. The tea lights came with pretty wraps, but I wanted wraps in my chosen colors, so I made my own. Again, this took a while....and I broke my heart stamp :( That's what I get for buying $1.50 paper punches at Michael's:

Jenga guest book, idea thanks to many posts found on Pinterest.  And since Luke is a huge Jenga fan, this will actually get used!

Escort cards to let people know what table to sit at.  Card decorations were printed on business cards (Vistaprint is the bestest) and I taped folded paper to the back to get them to stand up.  Then I wrote in 100 names while attempting to mimicking the Google font "Tangerine".

The escort cards did double duty as pie-labels, just cut off the "Table __" at the bottom.  Fiance and I aren't huge fans of cake so we went with cheesecake and apple, blueberry, pecan, and cherry pies.  And lots of whipped cream.

That was pretty much it for decorations, aside from some tissue paper pompoms.  There was only so much time.  Luckily our venue was pretty enough that it didn't really need a lot of additional frills.  

Tags: wedding, jenga, centerpiece