DIY Wedding Reception Projects

This week I posted some of the DIY wedding ceremony projects I created when I tied the knot last year, but of course I didn't stop there.  Our wedding reception was filled with even more DIY wedding projects, starting as soon as guests walked in the door.

Instead of a typical wedding guest book, I created a photo book filled with our engagement photos and the story of our relationship.  I left the last few pages of the book blank for guests to sign and created a bookmark asking guests for their well wishes and showing them which pages to sign on. The bookmark was made from cardstock and had a red ribbon stripe glued to the top and bottom for a finishing touch and to bring in our wedding colors.

A super easy wedding diy project was creating personalized place cards.  I simply bought printable placecard paper, complete with perforations, and printed our guests' names and table numbers using our red ink and  the same font I used for other projects, like our wedding programs.

Once guests found their table on their place card, the table numbers were another diy project.  I created the table numbers from three-photo frames I found at the Dollar Store of all places.  The center photo contained a table number I simply printed out from my computer.  But what made these table numbers so special, was the two other photos in each frame.  For each table number, I placed a photo of each of us at that age.  So table #1 had photos of each of us at age one, and so forth.  The table numbers were a hit and were a fun and easy way to add a personal touch to each table setting.

How about your wedding, what type of DIY projects did you do?

DIY Wedding Ceremony Projects

Since Rob and I celebrated our very first wedding anniversary this past weekend, I wanted to share some of the details that made our wedding so special to us. I couldn't help but get my little diy hands all over the details of our wedding and I came up with quite a few diy wedding projects.

We had a pretty traditional church wedding ceremony, but to make it even more memorable, we started it off with a slide show of our childhood photos and photos of us together. The childhood photos were set to the song "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" sung by Israel Kamakawiwo Ole' and photos of us as a couple were shown to the tune of "Better Together" by Jack Johnson. These songs were perfect for the occasion.

For the ceremony I made our own diy wedding programs. Using some velum paper, pretty silver printed paper, cardstock, and little charms and ribbon I created these multi-layer diy wedding programs:

The wedding programs were held in a white basket that was lined with a red cloth napkin which matched our wedding colors. After the ceremony, the guests blew bubbles at us which were tied with red ribbons and were contained in a matching basket.

But my very favorite DIY wedding project was our custom hand painted aisle runner. I created a custom monogram of our names which was used throughout the wedding and then hand painted it onto a white wedding aisle runner. The result, a beautiful custom monogram aisle runner.

These projects are shared on diy day.

Our First Wedding Anniversary

This weekend, hubby Rob and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary!  It's hard to believe it has already been a year since I donned my wedding dress and we walked down the aisle.  To celebrate, Rob and I headed to New York City for the day to have dinner and take a stroll through Central Park.  We even took a romantic boat ride on the lake in Central Park which was my favorite part of the day.  The park looks so gorgeous from the water.

The next day we celebrated our first wedding anniversary with an anniversary party with our families.  We had lots of dessert and broke out our year-old wedding cake which I was very excited to eat since I only had one bite of it during the wedding.  To decorate for our anniversary party, I set up the dining room table with special mementos from the wedding.  I added a red table runner, our wedding color, and decorated with our unity candle, another set of pretty crystal candle-holders which were a wedding gift, and a bride figure Rob gave to me when we got engaged.

And of course we displayed our wedding cake, complete with our cake topper and a "1" candle for us to blow out!

We had a wonderful anniversary and I have no intention to stop calling us newlyweds!

For our married blog friends, how did you celebrate your first wedding anniversary?  (The blog comments are now fixed and working, so please leave a comment spilling the details!)