Crafting up your wedding

By: amanda

As you are planning your wedding, inevitably a well meaning friend will give you a book—or worse—a bridal magazine, and soon you will find yourself picking out wedding colors (you only get 2!) and a bouquet freeze-drying package complete with glass dome before you have even thought about what you want out of your wedding.

Weddings come with lots of baggage. Balancing the expectations, traditions, and dreams of others can become so overwhelming that your own dreams get lost. So I am here to remind you—your wedding should be like YOU. Not like your sister’s wedding, or Martha Stewart’s, but reflecting your taste, your interests, your values.

A crafty wedding is personal, manageable, affordable and very special.

The Approach: Make Something...

Of course an obvious way to make your wedding crafty is to make things. I (with a little help from my friends) made some special things:

Beading: A bridesmaid and I crafted a tiara for me to wear out of purple crystals and beads. We loved it so much that it inspired even more beading, and eventually we made hair ornaments for all three female attendants, bead flower cufflinks for the groom, and bead flowers for the boutonničres and corsages.

The wedding was outdoors at night, and some friends of my mom’s were inspired to make candleholders to hang in the trees. We used only candles and Christmas tree lights to light the back yard, which gave it a fairyland glow.

…But Not Everything.

Even a small, simple wedding has lots of components. Pressuring yourself to do everything the DIY way would be overwhelming. I am no seamstress, for example, so I bought a dress off the rack, and since we were feeding 150 people dinner, I knew the only way to make that manageable for us was to hire a caterer. They brought the food, the utensils, the linens and (better still) took them all away at the end of the night.

The key is to make choices. Do some things yourself, hire people to do other things if that is possible and, ask your loved ones for help.

Accepting Help

One of the best things about our wedding was the outpouring of support we got from friends and family. Not only did people help out, they were honored that we asked. The key is to ask people to do things that are reasonable and play on the strengths and skills they already have. It is also crucial to be really asking--make it possible for the person to say no by asking privately and plenty of time in advance.

Our friend Daryl played guitar as we walked down the aisle, Josh was the DJ for dinner and dancing, Janice did the flowers, Nikko made the guest book, Carl tended bar, and the list goes on and on. Their contributions made the wedding much more personal, and they really enjoyed being able to participate in the day, rather than just attend. That is what a wedding is about: community building.

You can also half make things.

I collect souvenir snow globes, and feel no trip is complete without the acquisition of one. I wanted my guests to have a souvenir of our wedding, so we chose snow globes as a favor. Though there are ways to make snow globes, we chose to order empty ones from a promotional materials supplier, and we created our own inserts for them. My groom drew a wedding logo, which we color photocopied, trimmed and put in the globes. After the wedding, we copied and trimmed a wedding photo for the other side of the globe, which we mailed to people in thank you cards.
For our wedding invitations, we had the basic invite and reply cards printed from a very reasonably priced mail order service. Then we doctored them up by binding them to a paper frame with ribbon.

Don’t forget the ceremony.

The whole reason you are gathered together is to announce your union to your community. What kind of marriage are you creating? What are you and your beloved celebrating and cementing with this ceremony? It is crucial to have a ceremony that says what you want to say and reflects the true nature of your relationship. Even traditional, religious ceremonies contain choices of readings and other text.

Find a minister or justice of the peace who is willing to work with you to create a ceremony you believe in. Or, choose a friend who is willing to become ordained and marry you themselves. We were very lucky to have a friend who is an experienced minister in the Church of Craft. She met with us several times as we created a ceremony that hit all the traditional markers, but said exactly what we wanted to say. I was nervous that our guests would be put off by our original ceremony, but in fact we got many compliments for how meaningful and moving it was.

A few notes

A note about the WEDDING INDUSTRY
The wedding industry is a racket, pure and simple. Put the word “wedding” before any service and you can expect the price to be increased by at least 25%. There are also “rules” that people in the wedding industry want you to live by, that may be inspired by the etiquette of yore, but do not have to be your rules. BEWARE the wedding industry. Question the experts. Pay a fair price for things, even trying to get quotes without using the word “wedding” (i.e. I need catering for a large party, etc.).

A note about MUSIC
If, like me, music is a meaningful part of any gathering for you, be very careful with your choice of a DJ or band. Traditional wedding DJs tend to overpower a party, inflicting their version of “fun” on your gathering. I am thinking, in particular, of dancing one evening with a good natured bride who told me through her gritted smile “I told them absolutely no Chicken Dance” as she flapped her “wings” and shook her big white butt. If you are lucky enough to have a friend who can DJ, that is ideal, but if not, do like my friends Diane and Josh, who made terrific mix-tapes of music they loved. This meant that they loved every song that came on, and they knew they wouldn’t be leading a conga line unless they wanted to be.

See Also

Dyed Fungus: a Tutorial
Seeds of Inspiration
Punk Fui: Feng Shui for the rest of us