Monday, April 28, 2008

Budget Wedding: Crafty Brides Create Their Own Day

In recent years, the tradition of the bride’s family paying for the wedding has become rare. These days, the couples pay for the big day themselves. As a result, there’s been a push for couples to truly personalize the occasion and keep a close eye on their pocketbooks.

Family heirloom pattern

One bride sewed her own wedding dress. She used a 1950’s Vogue pattern that belonged to her great aunt and was later passed on to her mother. She recalls her childhood dream of wearing a dress made from that exact pattern on her wedding day. She says she feels fortunate to come from a family of seamstresses.

Her mom would make her own gowns to go to dinner parties. She made this one particular gown for a party, and this bride had seen it, and the image never left her imagination.

She also designed and sewed her bridesmaids’ dresses, simply because she had something in her head and couldn’t find any one pattern that had it. She combined sleeves, bodice and skirt from three different patterns to make the dresses.

The cost of her wedding dress? $50. It’s made of opalescent patterned taffeta which is a stiffer texture than satin. She says it cost only $7 a yard. She says it was incidental that she saved money on the dresses. With these items, it was the design that was important.

Remember, as a bride only you know what you want.

But for other items, like wedding invitations and bouquets, she found some real bargains by making them herself.

Collecting ideas

Another bride says it took several shopping trips to find the best bargains. She comparison-shopped for almost everything from her reception centerpieces and bridal party bouquets to her invitations and even the wedding favors.

She says they originally wanted to pick and choose things that appealed to them and turn it all over to a wedding coordinator, but she decided she didn’t want some stranger planning her wedding. She wanted to do it herself.

She had a boxful of bridal magazines, newsletters and giveaways from the expos. She started with the centerpieces after realizing she could improve on the ideas she had seen and read about.
She bought the materials from a wholesale craft store and a thrift shop. She got white silk roses by the bunch and large, clear glass vases to put them in. Each vase had two bunches and silk fern leaves.

She says she creatively disguised the "cheap" flowers by wrapping the vase in white gift tissue and white-silver mesh and satin ribbons, filling the inside vase with Styrofoam to stick the bunches in, and plastic shopping bags to make the flowers look full.

On two-by-two cards, she wrote a love sonnet by William Shakespeare and attached one to each of the 10 centerpieces. Guests later remarked on how elegant the centerpieces were.

The cost for all of the centerpieces? About $120. She says that was a steal when she compared it to the simplest $25 per centerpiece that she saw.


Homemade bouquets

Another bride made her bouquet and the flower bunches for her bridal party of eight. She skipped ordering special bridal bouquets and bought fresh flowers instead. Her bouquet was made of 12 white carnations and six white mums. Each woman in her bridal party had a bunch of six football mums.

She says the secret to keeping them fresh is to buy the flowers from the flower shop the day before the wedding, and to put them in the freezer as soon as you get home. She says on the wedding day she cut the stems and soaked them in plant food. She then attached the stems with masking tape and wrapped them with satin trailing ribbons.

One bride wrapped the stems of her dozen red-rose bouquet with ribbon, which like the other bride her flowers were not special bridal flowers.

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