Easy handmade Autumn/Winter wedding place cards

 

My handmade wedding place cards

After Pinterest-ing the hell out of every ‘winter wedding’ keyword, I knew that I wanted to get ‘hands on’ in the creation of my perfect wedding day.

I love pine cones and that Autumnal Wintery feeling they bring so new they’d be a big feature on my wedding day set for the 29^th of December. So, I set out to create my own place cards taking inspiration from these beautiful photos I’d coveted on Pinterest.

Stealing Pine cone Place card Inspo from Pinterest

What I used:

• A pack of plain matte A4 white card
• An alphabet stamp pack
• A guillotine
• Real pine cones – Free… Yes, it’s my favourite word too! Or these are cute with white frosting

You can pick this all up from Amazon just follow the links! 

Ask friends and family to collect pine cones for you. Pine cones usually start to fall in England in the Autumn. You’ll need to leave them for a month in a cool dry place before use.

Mark out the rough dimensions you want for your place cards on the white card and use the guillotine to card out as many cards as you need. I recommend cutting out some extra for errors and spares. Average place card dimensions you’ll want are about 2 x 3.5 inches or 5.5 x 8.5 cm.

From your typed guest list begin to stamp each name on your cards. I recommend testing the stamps and ink to work out the right pressure required.

Then you’re all set for the day. Bring along the cards and the cones and put the bottom of each card into the side of a pine cone and you’ll find it will fit snuggly without glue.  

I was so pleased with how cute my place cards looked and how simple they were to create!

If you’re all about sparkle you can always add glue and glitter to your pine cones. There’s a great YouTube video for this or you can buy pre-decorated pine cones.

Love 

LauraClaire

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The importance of an on-the-day wedding planner

Why I made my own silk artificial wedding flowers

With my wedding budget spreadsheet firmly in place I knew a few items would have to give and for me, although flowers are a beautiful extravagance, they were just too much of an extravagance. I couldn’t bare the idea of spending thousands decorating my tables, ceremony room and then bouquets and buttonholes only for them to die a few days later. 

Our wedding date in between Christmas and New Year also proved an issue as many of the flower markets would be closed in-between that period and there would be certain flowers we wouldn’t be able to get.

So, I took the risk and opted to make my own wedding flowers from silk flowers bought online and video tutorials off YouTube.

YouTube has an absolute tonne of help and all I did was search for 'how to make silk wedding flowers' and watched 4 or 5 to get me trained. Simple as that! 

The one below from Momma from Scratch I think is particularly useful. 

It was a little nerve-wracking but as a 'crafter' at heart I secretly relished at the challenge.

It took me about 2 months of evenings to complete the 7 table bouquets, 4 small posies for the aisle chairs in the ceremony room, my own bouquet and 3 for the bridesmaids and 9 button holes for the groomsmen. 

Not a small task now I’m totting it all up!

However, I really enjoyed doing it, found it surprisingly simple, loved having full control over the look and feel of my flowers and saved a BOMB. (and still had a few left over to decorate my wedding cake!)

I saved at a minimum £850 with most full wedding flower package in the London and Surrey area averaging between £1,000 - £1,500.

Here’s my wedding flower cost breakdown:

3x Ribbon rolls for bouquets (on sale in Clintons) - £3.00

Total cost for silk flowers + Delivery £135.27

Buttonhole pins (20 x 6mm 3.5cm Diamante Craft Pins from Ebay) and 2 thickness types of Green Galvanised Floral Wire: £6.88 

2x Green paper stem wrap - £2.00

Jute twine from hobbycraft - £2.00

Total: 149.15

Item’s I already had but you’ll need:

• Wire cutters
• Scissors
• Mini glue gun

Love 

LauraClaire

In case you missed them... 
Easy Handmade Autumn Winder Wedding Place Cards

How I decorated my Reception Venue

How to make your own beautiful silk artificial wedding flowers

The importance of an on-the-day wedding planner

The importance of an ‘on the day’ wedding planner

Our wedding day was, as every tells you about theirs, the most more perfect day we could have ever imagined. All the 1 and a half years of tireless planning, making and budgeting had all paid off and even, on our bitter winter wedding day, the sun popped out for our photos!

If you ask me off-hand about the day itself I would say that there was nothing I would change but, with my super critical hat on there is ONE regret…

The importance of an ‘on the day’ wedding planner

So, I’d never wanted a wedding planner. I didn’t see the point; half the fun was in planning your own wedding and planning is something I take pretty seriously anyway so it was never a worry. With spreadsheets and timelines for EVERYTHING I was finished with all ‘wedmin’ well before the big day and had no worries at all.

A remember a wedding planner had caught me at a local fair and recommended being there ‘just for the day’ to make sure things ran smoothly. I reassured her that my venue had provided a dedicated planner for my day and all would be fine.

This was true, I did have a planner from the venue and she was there on the day making sure things ran to plan and overall, they did. However, she was the venue’s planner, not my planner. Something that only occurred to me after the big day.

Her priorities were of course to make the day a success but were always going to be bias.

They got the main meal wrong on our wedding breakfast. We were supposed to have beef wellington and that’s what all our menus said but we were served a beef roast which was very delicious but not quite right.

We’d also pre-ordered gin and tonic cocktails for the arrival of our evening guests which, although I saw some being passed around there certainly weren’t as many as I know I’d paid for.

Finally, all our evening food was thrown out so that, at the end of the night when the last-people-standing were craving something to soak up the booze, they’d not kept anything behind.

For me, having those extra pair of eyes to check all the things I was trying to keep an eye on would have been well worth while paying for. That’s why, not having an on-the-day wedding planner is my only regret!

Things an on-the-day Wedding Planner could look after: 

1. Timings of the day
2. Making sure everyone signs your guestbook and wedding frame
3. Making sure your DJ, Band and any other suppliers arrive and time and with everything you were invoiced for
4. Pre-thinking for you – that midnight snack for example!
5. Checking your drinks tab throughout the night
6. Moving flowers from ceremony room to wedding tables
7. On hand with the emergency kit
8. Another pair of eyes to make sure your videographer and photographer capture every moment on your list
9. Someone to free up the task list from your bridesmaids and groomsman so they can have fun and relax
10. Gathering family and friends for photos

What do you think? Did you have a wedding planner?

Love 

LauraClaire

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How to make your own beautiful silk artificial wedding flowers

Why I made my own wedding flowers 

How to make your own beautiful Wedding Bouquet from silk flowers

Making your own wedding flowers can appear, at first, like a quite daunting task. However, it’s something I’d never done before and I found it simple and lots of fun to have full creative licence over the look of my bouquet. 

Plus, by using silk flowers I was able to keep my bouquet as a beautiful reminder of the day.

As you’ll see from my original post about my wedding flowers, I ended up hand-making everything flower-related from buttonholes for the groomsmen to flower posies for the tables. 

However, to keep things simple I’m going to run through the steps I took to make my own wedding bouquet using a gorgeous collection of silk flowers I picked online.

Firstly, I need to understand the basics of making a fake flower bouquet and where better to find out than YouTube!

I found these videos the most helpful and easy to understand.

5 things to remember are:

1. To cut up larger silk flowers/posies into single flowers. You can use wire and green stem paper to make the stem longer. It takes a while but gives you more flower for your money, more creative licence for how each flower sits and a better-looking bouquet.

2. Remember that you’ll usually want the bouquet to be symmetrical so consider buying enough duplicates of the same flowers.

3. Take enough time playing around with flower order and arrangement before securing the whole bouquet with stem paper. Try not to secure too high up the stems so that the bouquet has ‘room to breathe’ and is nicely spaced out.

4. Think about any other sentimental elements you might want to include in your bouquet and attach them with a glue gun to stem wire. I added pearl elements that were used in one of my best friend’s bouquet she gave to me as a gift from her wedding.

5. Choose 5 to 6 flowers for your bouquet of varying sizes. Then select at least 2 types of foliage to complement the flowers and fill space to ‘plump out’ the bouquet. These could be ferns, grasses or leaves.

For my wedding bouquet I wanted a muted, soft vintage look and so used a mixture of white, pink, cream and brown flowers. Having no idea where to start I looked online to get some ideas of best colour combinations.

My bouquet was 24cm in diameter and 33cm in height and used a combination of peony’s in peach and cream, pink sweet peas, chestnut brown roses, Lambs Ears in Dusky Pink, Magnolia, Ivy, Flocked Maidenhair Fern, coral flower buds and Snow Berries.

I was so pleased with the result and love that my wedding bouquet is everlasting. It now sits in a shabby chic vase in our bedroom.

So, are you tempted? If so, I’d love to know how you get on! 

But if it all seems a bit too much Amazon does some beautiful pre-made silk and artificial bouquets. These are a couple of my favourites below. Click on them to take a closer look. 

Love 

LC

In case you missed them... 
Easy Handmade Autumn Winder Wedding Place Cards

How I decorated my Reception Venue

Why I made my own wedding flowers 

The importance of an on-the-day wedding planner

How I decorated my reception venue for my Surrey Winter Wedding

My husband and I got married in 2017 in Surrey at the beautiful venue that is Farnham Castle. It's voted the best wedding venue in the South East and I couldn't agree more. 

As I think most people do with their venues, we absolutely fell head over heals in love with the place so didn't feel it really needed too much decor to make it extra 'wedding special'. 

That being said, I couldn't help adding a few touches. It's the most fun part of wedmin - obesssing over Pinterest and falling in love with all the beautiful ideas!

And... after all the hours of planning, making, deliberating and prepping I wanted to share with you just a few of the additional touches that made our wedding day our own.

I opted against chair covers or ribbons as it wasn't really my style but loved the effect of the dramatic sparkly waterfall lights added to the room, especially with its grand high ceiling. You can re-create the look with these Curtain lights on Amazon 

I used the same card pattern for our table names as for the wedding stationary so it all matched. Pearls, shabby-chic wallpaper covered books, mason jars and handmade silk flower posies made up the center pieces. With pine cones and tealights dotted around each table. 

Our place name settings I made myself. They were incredible cost-effective and easy to create. 

Dotted around each table were photos of us, family and friends as reminders of all we'd done together. 

My favourite added touches that created great keep-sake memories were the 'sign our frame' that I bought. Instead of buying a wedding frame kit from Hobbycraft which I felt looked quite ugly and plain I found a wood panel based frame with lots of writing space for just £20 in TKMaxx. It gave our guestbook frame a little more style and looks beautiful hung on our wall. However, this frame idea is super cute too. 

Second was the date night ideas lolly pop sticks that sat on each table for guests to fill in. We've only just begun to make our way through the dates now - some our brilliantly funny and some heart-warming.. it's fun to guess who wrote what! 

I'm a big kid at heart and have a mega sweet-tooth so a candy cart or sweet stand HAD to be a feature of my wedding. My mum took on the challenge admirably and, after I Pinterest-ed her a snap of a donut wall and she even got dad involved to create this beautiful heart-shaped donut stand. 

I hope you've enjoyed reading this post as much as I've enjoyed reminiscing over it! 

I'd love to see what brilliant and beautiful touches you create for your wedding. Send links in the comments box below. 

Love 
LauraClaire

In case you missed them... 
Easy Handmade Autumn Winder Wedding Place Cards

How I decorated my Reception Venue

How to make your own beautiful silk artificial wedding flowers

Why I made my own wedding flowers 

The importance of an on-the-day wedding planner