Rustic Handmade Wedding {or home decor} Projects

For some reason, DIY wedding projects just make me happy.
Even if no one close to me is planning a wedding, I still just enjoy looking at fun ideas on Pinterest and other places around the web.   

Right now my niece just happens to be two weeks away from her wedding, and I am so excited to be helping her out with some projects for her special day. I wanted to share a few of the projects we've been working on with you all today. 



One of the ways she is trying to keep costs down is by using DIY paper flowers in addition to some fresh flowers. 

All of these flowers are made from coffee filters. We are making most of them white, but mixing in some that have been tinted yellow and pink as well. 

The tinted coffee filters were dipped into a mixture of water and acrylic paint, wrung out and hung to dry across a line in the backyard. Thanks to temps in the low 90's last week, they were literally dried in minutes! I followed a tutorial I found here. 

We will have around 200 flowers when we're done and will only have spent a few dollars for supplies. 

String art seems to be all the rage right now, and my niece loved the idea of a "heart strings" piece. She actually found a pallet with this piece of plywood already attached to the back so we decided that would be a perfect rustic background. 

I gave the wood a light coat of spray paint. Then I created a large heart-shaped template from paper which I transferred onto a sheet of paper almost the size of the wood. (I wish I had taken more photos during the process, but there are many tutorials for projects like this online) 
I taped the large piece of paper with the heart shape drawn on it to the wood, then hammered nails through the paper, along the lines of the heart shape and then simply tore the paper away. 

Then my niece went to work with the yellow string just criss-crossing back and forth in a random pattern and around the perimeter of the heart shape, and tied it off at the bottom. 

I think it turned out super cute! 

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The next project we did was inspired by the photo above. 

"Real" marquee signs are very expensive, so my niece asked if we could try to duplicate this look on a smaller scale, using cardboard letters instead. Hey, I'm always willing to try something new! 

We started with these large paper mache letters she purchased at Hobby Lobby. She cut the front out of them with a knife. The store was actually out of the letter "O", but she was clever enough to pick up a letter "Q" instead and we just did a little 'surgery' to turn it into an "O". 

I painted all the letters with Krylon craft spray paint in Hammered Dark Bronze to give the illusion of metal. I marked out where I wanted the lights to go. I removed all the globes from the string of lights. I cut an "X" in the cardboard where each bulb would go, pushed the light through the back of the letter and re-attached the globe on the front. 

I found a scrap of wood and spray painted it the same as the letters. The guys who will set this up at the wedding will attach the letters to the wood base for stability and the messy wires showing in the photo will get neatly taped to the back of the letters. I love the way it turned out! 

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The last project I finished up this week was inspired by the photo above.  

This is another found pallet that my niece sanded and stained. 

She gave me the go ahead to use any font style I wanted, so I ended up going the easy route, using a vinyl stencil that I've had forever. I started by stenciling the letters in chalk to see if everything was positioned the way I wanted it. When I was happy with the way it was laid out, I simply painted over the chalked letters with two coats of white acrylic paint.

I like the way this looks so much I might do another one for myself with different words. (The pallet looks splotchy here, but it was actually spots on my camera lens. Oh boy...) 

I have one more pallet project to work on next week, inspired by this one- 

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I'll share a photo or two over on my Facebook page when I'm finished!

You can see lots of other DIY wedding and party inspiration on my Pinterest board here, and I'll try to get some photos to share from the actual wedding so you can see how they used some of the things we're making. 

Thanks so much for stopping by, and I do wish you all a beautiful Mother's Day weekend!

Jeanette


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