DIY project Archives - Page 4 of 6 - The Natural Wedding Company

Blog: DIY project

Charlie

New Wives Club #5: how to grow your own cut flowers – what to grow

Charlie

The idea of growing your own cut flowers seems to be popular at the moment, with many of us dreaming of a small patch of ground dedicated to our own supply of pretty blooms that we can raid to decorate ours homes. The most difficult part, I find, is translating that dream into a reality.

In a bid to get myself a small patch of cut flowers, and to encourage and help you to as well, I’ve enlisted the help of Chloe from BareBlooms to share some of her tips on how to start your own cutting garden. Chloe grows many of her own flowers for her business BareBlooms, which provides beautiful seasonal flowers for weddings, you may well have seen some of her work when I featured Rhiannon’s wild September bouquet on the blog.

Charlie

Make your own natural spring wreath by finding inspiration in the hedgerows

Charlie

Regular readers will know that on Sunday it was the TNWC 5th birthday party, which was held at my house with 11 lovely guests – all readers of the website and blog. I made a number of items for the party, which I hope to share with you, but to start with I wanted to share this natural hedgerow wreath I created. All the photos are taken on my phone so nothing fancy!

My hedgerow wreath was created using hawthorn cuttings, mostly green ones, but I managed to find a few with the pretty white blossom already out. Before I go any further I must say I wouldn’t recommend you to use hawthorn, even though it is so beautiful and so seasonal at the moment. Why? Because it droops incredibly quickly – more on that below.

Charlie

DIY tutorial to create your own wedding pomander ball using herbs and seasonal flowers from Jay Archer Floral Deisgn

Charlie

I’ve got some lovely blog posts lined up for you, from real weddings to creative ‘how to’ guides – and today I’ve got a fantastic DIY tutorial created especially for you by Jay of Jay Archer Floral Design. Jay has created this beautiful floral pomander ball using homegrown muscari and garden herbs, along side pretty white ranunculus.

So here’s over to Jay:

The pomander ball has been traditionally carried by flower girls and bridesmaids. However, a bride may also carry a pomander ball as a modern replacement to a traditional bouquet. Making your own pomander ball is really quite easy. Maybe spend an afternoon practising one with your Mum, friends and bridesmaids over a glass of vino or cup of char.

You could make a pomander from almost any flower; hydrangea florets, spray roses & rose buds and dahlia are just some examples. I would opt for smaller, more rounded flowers to give a better shape.

Charlie

Photobooth and brown luggage tag wedding invitations and how you can make your own

Charlie

If you don’t want to do anything too complicated for your wedding invitations then this idea might be perfect for you, whilst still being fun and personal to you as a couple. A photobooth style strip of pictures (with details on the back) and a brown luggage tag fastened together with string.

Making the photobooth style pictures

Both these items could be printed at home – there are lots of photo programmes that allow you to make collages like these (I like Photoscape which is free to download), so you could take some pictures and put them into a collage to create a photobooth style strip without having to leave home. This would enable you to easily print details onto the back of the photos too.

Creating the luggage tags

Brown luggage tags come in all sizes so you could find the right size for you and simply stamp a message like they have done here onto the front. If you wanted to include more details printed directly onto the luggage tag, then you can print onto recycled brown card (available from some of these businesses) then cut them out and trim the corners to make them appear like a luggage tag.

You can punch a hole and stick on the hole reinforcers (brown ones are available from Etsy if you search for ‘reinforcements’ under ‘All Items’) and they should look just like a ready bought luggage tag, but with all the details you want printed on – and no nightmare thoughts of how you put a luggage tag through your home printer!!

I love fonts, and am a regular visitor to Dafont in search of fun fonts. I believe (this shows how much of a font geek I am) that the font used on the brown luggage tag in the pictures, is one called Artistamp Medium. I love it and use it quite a lot, if you take a look at my Directory Showcase features it is used on my graphics. You should be able to type the name into the Dafont search engine and download it for home use.

Alternatively, print your details onto paper and glue them onto the back of the luggage tags like they have done here. You could also jazz up your invitations by using coloured raffia or stripey butcher twine instead of white string.

Charlie

Woodland inspired luggage tag ‘save the dates’

Charlie

Today it’s more handmade loveliness from a lovely bride-to-be and another fab idea for creating ‘save the dates’. These ‘save the date’ luggage tags were made by Tara and her husband-to-be Ben who run a vintage restoration business called Elegantly Wasted Vintage. They are getting married in December and are going for a woodland Edwardian feel for their wedding.

Tara was happy to share the details of how she made them and where she got her supplies… The ‘save the dates’ were easy to make – although all the furious typing on the old typewriter gave me very sore wrists – I don’t know how my mum, who was a secretary in the 1970s, did it! The whole lot cost about £15 to make 50. I used letter stamp blocks from Dunelm Mill and cost £2, the tags were £2 for 50 from Ebay, the twine was £3 from Nutscene, and I ordered the stag stamp online from stampsdirect for £7. I trimmed the paper with the details using scalloped edged scissors.

Charlie

A sweet, homemade animated ‘save the date’ and how you can make your own

Charlie

I have something very special, fun and inspiring to share with you all this afternoon – a homemade animated ‘save the date’! This was sent to me by the lovely Beth who is getting married to Ben this coming July 2012. She described it as a country-wedding inspired, budget ‘save the date’ – why don’t you watch it for yourself…

How fun is that? And it’s accompanied by a song (Crystal Fighters Plage) that seems to perfectly fit the style, and it’s short but sweet – I would be pretty excited if I was a wedding guest and this landed in my inbox. So after watching it half a dozen times I decide to ask Beth how they created it, as I was pretty sure some of your lovely readers might want to create something like it yourself.

Charlie

Handmade ‘tying the knot’ save the dates made from brown card and twine

Charlie

The joys of having a photographer husband-to-be! If you’re the lovely Lisa, one of my blog readers, it means you can make pretty wedding details and get great pictures of them – which in turn means lovely photos to share with you all.

Lisa was inspired by my own rustic ‘save the dates’ and got in touch to share hers – I think they are so beautiful and they incorporate a really neat extra that Lisa found on this blog whilst searching for inspiration – a twine knot.

Charlie

Do it yourself: rustic handmade wedding stationery ~ part 1

Charlie

I’ve decided to split the ‘do it yourself’ for our wedding stationery into four parts as there seemed too much to share in just one post, and I didn’t want you all nodding off. So without further ado, here’s Part 1.

First off, you should know I did all of this in Microsoft Word. Perhaps insane, as Word is not meant for graphic design, but it’s what I have. I don’t have any fancy software packages, so I had to do the best that I could with what I had. Yes, it undoubtedly caused headaches and extra time faffing about, but I got where I wanted in the end and I’m proud of my effort.

The Invitation

Inspiration

For me, our invitation needed to reflect what our wedding was going to be about. I wanted people to get excited (hopefully!) and have a sense of what kind of wedding they were going to.

I went through various different ideas, including sewing mini bunting onto each card, which I decided might kill me off and wasn’t a true reflection of our wedding day. Here are the some of the ideas I was inspired by…

From left to right starting at the top: found Once Wed; Perch Papiers; Junkaholique; Ruffled; unknown; found Snippet & Ink; unknown; Heather Ross; Ruffled; found Twig & Thistle

Charlie

Do it yourself: eco-friendly brown card and raffia rustic ‘save the dates’

Charlie

Here goes with the first of my ‘do it yourself’ guides from our wedding – lots of detail, I know, but this is for anyone wishing to recreate elements themselves.

*Please note that my ‘how to’ guide is for individual, private use, and not to be used for distribution or resale. Many thanks.*

Would love to know what you think and if there’s anything else you want details of.

Our ‘save the dates’ were envelope-less and quite tiny. I saw this fantastic idea and thought it was brilliant (some people are so talented!) – so I set about making my own version.

We used 100% recycled brown card from a wonderful website called eco-craft (we bought almost all our paper and card for wedding projects from here) – I love that this brown card is called ‘Hairy Manilla’ – very un-weddingy!

I created the design on Microsoft Word – fitting three ‘save the dates’ to one piece of landscape A4 (I’ll include full details of fonts used at the bottom of the post for anyone interested).

I wanted something simple and quite rustic looking, so we just went for text and a tiny image, similar to the cow parsley that lines the hedges in May at the time of our wedding.

It took a bit of fiddling about and printing off copies to get the text in the right place for where we wanted the folds. The card is scored in two places, making three parts, and then sealed at the back (hence no need for an envelope).

After printing the ‘save the dates’, I used my trusty guillotine (couldn’t have got through many a moment without it – essential kit for anyone planning on making paper items for their wedding) to slice them into three. Next I faintly drew on pencil lines for where the folds would be, then used the blade on my scissors to gently score a fold.

Charlie

Homemade jam jar lanterns – a ‘how to’

Charlie

We have spent the last few weekends making jam jar lanterns for our wedding. I have had friends and colleagues at work saving all their jars for us, Mr Rigg has been busy soaking off all the labels and together we have been attaching wire to make handles.

They are so simple to make, just time consuming! Especially attaching the wire. They’re not particularly beautiful, the wire is a bit twisted, but I love the handmade look of them, all that glass and silver wire, and the fantastic shapes and sizes of the jars.

Seasonal wedding ideas:

Spring

Summer

Autumn

Winter

DIY + Inspiration

Real Weddings

Suppliers + Products

Browse the blog:

Planning

Advertise

Get your eco wedding business listed on our directory