D-I-Why?

Confession time: I am not a DIY kind of person. I desperately wish I was. I envy those who are. (Yes, envy. I am a Scorpio, after all.) In all honesty, cracking open an issue of Martha Stewart Living or Real Simple (simple? seriously???) makes me a little stressed out. But the pictures are so pretty, I can't stop looking at them.

When it comes to our wedding, our budget dictates that DIY will be necessary. Although even if the budget was 10 times as big, our goal of making our wedding day a reunion of family and friends means we want to do as much ourselves and with our friends and family as we can. Lucky for us, we've got some pretty amazingly talented friends and family. I'll post about how they will be helping out soon, but in the meantime, I want to show a few of the projects this DIY novice will be attempting to tackle.

First up: the bouquet. You'll notice I used that word in its singular form. I'm planning on only having one bouquet in the entire wedding, and I'm planning on making it myself. Because the wedding will be in November, flower pickings won't be as plentiful as they are the rest of the year. I want to use flowers I'll be able to buy looking fresh and lovely at our local supermarket and with a small price tag to boot. After looking around online, I came across these gorgeous bouquets made with that old grocery store stalwart, carnations.

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Even if Charlotte York wouldn't approve, I think these carnation bouquets are sweet and simple, the exact feel I want for my wedding. Better yet, I've found a few tutorials online that make these looks not too difficult to recreate. I plan on doing a test run in the next few weeks so I'll put the photos of the process and finished product online. It seems like there are pins involved so as long as I don't end up with a bloody bouquet, I'll probably consider the experiment a success. I plan on using a solid-color selection of either cream or deep red flowers.

Next up: centerpieces. I'm still not sure how many tables we'll need to accommodate our 15 guests, plus all the yummy food and drinks, but I do know how I plan on decorating them. As soon as we picked a backyard wedding in the fall, we knew we would want to use many different light sources that could double as decorations, from strands of twinkle lights to candles. For the tables, I've fallen in love with these centerpieces.

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So pretty. And eco-friendly! I read online that this couple saved pickle and jam jars for a year before their wedding in order to have enough candleholders for their tables. With our much smaller affair, I hope we can save enough, with the help of The Backyard Bride's mom and dad, in the next seven months. And I can count it as DIY, right?

For more light sources, we want to string lights from the house to the trees, put up paper lanterns and add some candle lanterns (which I'm hoping one of us will be able to make) to hang and possibly light the aisle. Here are the photos I'm using for inspiration.

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So these are my first DIY projects. It's probably a stretch to even call the lighting DIY, but seriously, if there were remedial DIY classes, I would probably be failing those. Hopefully by the time the wedding rolls around, I'll at least be able to DIY my own dunce cap.