DIY Summer Wedding Centerpiece Ideas

If you are looking to add style to your wedding reception without paying a lot for a florist, think about making your own centerpieces. There are lots of beautiful designs which are easy enough to make yourself, and with all the money you save, you can splurge on something with long lasting value, like your wedding jewelry. These great ideas for DIY summer wedding centerpieces will provide all the inspiration you need to get started.

When you begin planning your reception centerpieces, think about the ways in which you can tie the arrangements in with both your wedding style and the season. If you are having a beach theme wedding, right down to the food and jewelry, incorporate that motif into your centerpieces. Or perhaps you are having a 4th of July wedding; DIY decorations with an Americana flavor would be ideal. Summer weddings tend to be brighter and more relaxed than winter events, so keep your design light and laid-back.

A gorgeous DIY centerpiece for a garden wedding would be a butterfly “bouquet”. Take a cute enamel watering can in your favorite color to use as the vessel. Then use a collection of butterflies on long stems to wire together into a unique and colorful centerpiece. Of course, you won’t use real butterflies, but rather ones created from beautiful paper, fabric, or feathers. They make a colorful and charming alternative to a floral table arrangement and are easy to assemble yourself. One of the best part about using non-floral elements for DIY centerpieces is that you can put them together a long time before the wedding.

Fresh fruit can make a striking wedding centerpiece. One of the simplest DIY table decorations you can create is to fill a tall clear vessel with sliced lemons and limes. Pack them tightly around the sides so that the round slices are pressed against the edges of the vessel for a great graphic design. The citrus fruit adds color and a summery feeling to the wedding. For a more modern effect, use a clear tall cylinder or choose a footed urn if your wedding style is more romantic. A lemon or lime flavored signature drink would be the perfect accompaniment to these centerpieces.

Beach theme centerpieces always fit in with summer weddings and are very easy for the DIY bride. Fill tall clear vases with a variety of seashells and surround them with low votive candles. Or go for a modern beach style by placing red faux coral into clear Lucite boxes and stacking them up. They will make very striking centerpieces for your reception, yet are a breeze to assemble.

Of course flowers are always popular for wedding decorations, and there are plenty of designs which do not require any experience to create. If you want to try your hand at DIY centerpieces but are not confident in your flower arranging abilities, gather a collection of pretty potted plants. For an Americana wedding, bright red geraniums would look fantastic in white wicker baskets. Best of all, after your wedding, the cheerful flowers can be planted outside your new home.

About the Author Guy Antonelli

Guy has been writing about society and weddings for a long time. If you have a topic you would like to know about, let us know at http://silverlandjewelry.com/. Let us help you select the perfect wedding jewelry for every member of the bridal party. All jewelry orders over $99 receive free shipping.

Tacky Wedding Ideas

The dictionary definition of the word tacky is “lacking style or good taste”. Not exactly the vision that most brides would say they have for their weddings, and yet every Saturday of the year, there are plenty of tacky things taking place at weddings around the country. These are some of the tackiest wedding ideas that some couples have at their weddings; ones which brides of taste should try to avoid at all costs!

Now, most brides do not set out to be tacky. They usually fall victim to poor advice from friends or family, and decide that the suggestion sounds good, and that because it came from a trusted source, it must be in good taste. Sadly, this is not always the case, and before they know it, well-meaning brides have turned their weddings into something that they never intended. Don’t less this happen to you!

One of the first examples of this that comes to mind is something that happened at a friend’s wedding. When her in-laws suggested a dollar dance, the innocent young bride, thought to herself, “Money is tight when planning a wedding, so a dollar dance would be a great way to raise some cash for the honeymoon.”. What she did not consider is that a dollar dance was not a custom that was usually observed where she came from, and far from lining up to dance with the bride and stuff money into her apron, the guests were appalled. Everyone remained standing on the sidelines while the bride suffered through the awkwardness of standing out on the dance floor alone for most of the dollar dance. A word to the wise, ladies, no matter how good it may sound at first, a dollar dance is always a tacky idea.

Another truly tacky idea that some couples have is to attempt to round up sponsors for their wedding in the same way one would for a charity event. The bride and groom go around to their relatives asking for donations in exchange for billing in the wedding program or a mention in the wedding toasts. It usually goes something like this: “Aunt Margaret, if you wanted to buy my wedding jewelry and veil for me, I will put a note in the program telling everyone how generous you were. And Uncle Bill, would you like to sponsor the d.j. for the reception?”. There is no other word for this behavior than shocking (or at least no other word that can appear in print!).

Oftentimes, a close family member might offer to help the couple with their wedding expenses, and if Aunt Margaret had come to the bride and told her that it would be her honor to gift her the wedding jewelry and bridal veil, that would be a lovely offer that the bride could accept in good conscious (with no note of thanks in the program, just a handwritten thank you note directly to the generous person). However, a wedding is not a commercial enterprise or a charitable foundation, no matter how much the bride and groom might try to pretend otherwise.

There is another very tacky thing that is sadly rather commonplace these days, which is including bridal registry information in the wedding invitations. Many brides may not even realize that this is in poor taste, especially since some registries will give you little cards for the express purpose of putting them in the envelopes with the invitations. However, a bride cannot always trust a store as her etiquette expert, as their goal is to sell as many sets of china and toasters as possible; whether you offend your guests is not a particular concern for them. But it should be for the bride and groom, which is why registry information, or worse yet, a notation requesting “cash gifts only”, should never, ever appear in a wedding invitation. After all, the last thing that you want is for the first impression people have of your wedding to be,”Oh my gosh – how tacky!”.

Finding the whole process of weddings and all the planning that goes into one fascinating, Laura writes about many of the considerations that brides have to deal with. Wedding jewelry makes a lovely gift for the bride.