100 Layer Cake

This project is so beautiful and REALLY relevant to any one of us with a crafty heart. You could make these to use around the house, for a special holiday dinner party, for a bridal shower, a festive brunch, for gifts… the list goes on. Which is one of the reasons we love running this blog! All the pretty photos and projects make good inspiration for life, not just weddings.

Here’s Rachel, with her final DIY project on 100LC.

We decided to rent the plainest, cheapest white tablecloths possible for our long dining tables. And since we weren’t having lots of fresh flowers or pretty place settings, we knew we’d want to use the napkins to add some color. The side benefit was that we got to have cotton napkins, which I love – they are actually absorbent, unlike the standard polyester ones you can rent from most places.

Napkins are easy enough to sew, but all that hemming is time consuming so I decided to start with pre-made napkins. If you’re having a smaller wedding, you could definitely save some money by making your own. Just start super early.

We wanted a striped look, but as we started playing with the process we found that we really loved the striped tie-dye effect we came up with. Have several extra napkins on hand so that you can experiment. Folding the napkins in different positions will give you stripes in different places and you’ll want to test your dye intensity and rinsing and drying procedures – all of these factors impact your final product.

Supplies:

Napkins (plain, sturdy cotton ones from here) – $250 for 180 napkins
Fabric dye (we used Rit powder) – $15 for several boxes with coupons
Salt – $2
Tubs for dying – used some storage containers we had
Gloves – had them

1. Prewash and dry all your napkins

2. Mix up your dye according to the instructions on your package, but with less water. We used Rit dye and we added the dye powder + 1/2 cup salt to 2 cups of hot water and then mixed that with an additional 4 cups of water. Depending on your desired intensity, you can vary this amount.

3. Fold the napkins. This is where you want to experiment. The placement of your stripes will vary based on how you fold the napkins.

4. Dip the folded edges of your napkins in the dye, holding for anywhere from 30 seconds to several minutes, depending on how saturated you want them. The dye will gradually creep up a little.

5. Rinse your napkins in warm water, gradually decreasing the temperature to cool, until the water runs almost completely clear. If you want well defined stripes, rinse very well at this point. If you want stripes + solid color background, rinse them gently but don’t worry about getting to the clear water point.

6. Hang dry if you want better defined stripes. If you prefer your napkins to have softer stripes + solid color background, you can skip this step and put them directly in the washer.

7. Run the napkins through the washing machine on warm (if you’re doing multiple colors, only run a single color in each cycle!). The colors will bleed a bit, which I liked because it gave them a nice overall color with the contrasting stripes.

8. Tumble dry and fold. The color will be totally set at this point – no worries about it smearing on your guests if the napkins get wet.

Large batch operation

We folded napkins individually, then stacked them together, used a large binder clip to keep them in place and then filled an entire rectangular storage container (which had the dye in it) with rows and just left them to soak up the dye. We could do about 30 napkins at a time this way.

Total costs

We spent about $270 on this project. The cotton napkins are $1.53 each to purchase vs. 70 cents to rent. So yes, this definitely increased our expenditure, especially because we ordered enough napkins to accommodate our entire guest list, since we knew we wouldn’t have the final guest count in until much later. But I really loved the napkins, they were useful, and they did add a lot to our tables. We tucked the programs and menus right inside and they functioned as our seating labels as well.

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If you haven’t seen Rachel + Dustin’s beautiful wedding, be sure to give it looksie ASAP. And there are still some of Rachel’s own napkins left in the Marketplace you guys! There’s no shame is taking the easy way out with your DIY-ing.

Don’t forget to pop over to Rachel’s blog this week for the rest of her tutorials.

Process photos by Rachel.
Wedding photos by Fresh in Love Photography.

The second installment in Rachel‘s DIY Tutorials is her fun painted tablecloths. Such a simple, easy idea with such huge impact! Leave it to Rachel to come up with things like this.

Here she is:

We knew we were having plain white linens for the dining tables, but we were hoping to make the other tables (escort, bar, gift, water, dessert, DJ, photobooth, chips) a little more exciting, so that they would function both as tablecloths and as decoration.

(Rachel’s master plan.)

I was looking at that Martha Stewart wedding idea where they have the gold metallic circles on the wall, made out of stick on decals. And I started thinking that it would be fun to do something like that for tablecloths. We kicked around a lot of ideas. We thought about making paper confetti overlays (the test run of this was AWESOME, but time consuming and we weren’t sure how easy they would be to transport) or using decals and then I realized that buying tablecloths is just a smidge (we are talking cents) higher than renting them. Sometimes it’s even cheaper, if there’s a sale.

I promptly bought table drapes (from here, because I found an online discount code) for all our tables that weren’t guest seating and an armload of fabric paint. I also ordered a dozen napkins, so that I would have the same fabric available for testing. Highly recommend this.

Supplies

Tablecloths in whatever length you need (we ordered from here) – $107 for 8 cloths in varying sizes
Blue painters tape – $5
Freezer paper (if you’re doing anything other than straight lines) – $3
Iron (if using freezer paper) – hopefully you have one already!
Fabric paint, in whatever colors you need (I use Jacquard Textile Colors) ~ $30
Paint brushes ~$6

1. Pre-wash and dry your tablecloths and test napkins, if using.

2. Test all your colors on the napkins, mixing custom colors as need be. Our coral was a mix of yellow, red and white and I mixed a big batch in a large jar.

3. Spread the tablecloth out on a covered surface (we used layers of newspaper). Really covered. The paint will seep through the fabric.

4. Tape off the areas you want to paint. We sketched out our design ideas ahead of time for all the striped tablecloths. I played the polka dot ones by ear. If you’re using freezer paper, you need to iron it into position (there are tons of tutorials for freezer paper stencils floating around – this one is nice and clear).

5. Paint! We only needed one coat.

6. Allow the tablecloths to set up for half an hour or so and then gently lift them off the covered table for a second and then put them back down in the same position. This seems silly, but if you let them dry completely without moving them a bit they’ll stick to the newspaper on the table.

7. Now allow them to dry fully (I’d give them an entire day, just to be safe) and then gently peel off the tape or freezer paper.

8. Toss them in the dryer on high for at least 20 minutes to heat set the paint. This could vary based on what fabric paint you use, which is why I recommend ordering napkins to use as your tests.

Notes

Keeping them from wrinkling is the tricky part, in my opinion. I ended up ironing all my tablecloths the morning of the wedding. Not so good. I would recommend delegating this task to someone with a good steamer, or shelling out for professional cleaning. A good cleaner will be able to hang the tablecloths in such a way that they won’t wrinkle.

Total costs

We spent about $150 on this project. To rent the tablecloths, it would have been $125, so in a practical sense, the additional cost of having custom tablecloths was $25 + several hours of our time.

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And remember, if you LOVE Rachel’s table cloths, they are for sale in the Marketplace!

Process photos by Rachel.
Wedding photos by Fresh in Love Photography.

We’re all so excited for this tutorial this morning, aren’t we? Rachel‘s super super cute wedding really came together with her “statement” project… the streamer backdrop. We’ll let Rachel take it from here!

We knew we needed some kind of backdrop for the ceremony, because the layout of the venue had us getting married in sort of an awkward location. The backdrop would serve to make the ceremony area stand out and would also hide the french doors with their cheap vertical blinds that would otherwise be directly behind us.

We thought about painting a sheet, just as we did the tablecloths, and I still think that would have been a great option. But we liked the idea of the color and movement that the streamer backdrop would give us. I’d seen some pretty photos floating around of ribbon streamers and I was imagining something like that, but with this fringey crepe paper instead.

Please note, if you have extreme color matching needs, they will not be satisfied by the usual suppliers of cheap crepe paper. And fancy crepe paper is expensive. We decided to go with a range of colors to give us the overall effect of our color scheme (which was supposed to be teal/turquoise + coral + sunny yellow but got boiled down to blue + pink + yellow in the crepe paper world).

Supplies:

Wooden dowels, in the length you need to cover (we had two 5′ dowels and three 3′ dowels) – $5
Hot glue gun + glue (already had the gun) ~ $10 on glue sticks
Crepe paper folds (I used 27 packages for a lot of coverage) $40
Additional fancy crepe paper (if desired) $50 (you don’t need as much as I bought!)
Metallic gold fringe (if desired) $25

1. Choose your materials.

I bought plenty of cheap crepe paper from this store and they ship really fast! They sell the Cindus brand of crepe paper that is fairly common online, so you can find it from other sources as well. In total, I ordered 27 packs (3 each of 9 different colors) and I used most of it but not all of it. With shipping, that came out to $40. Keep in mind that I was making a 10 foot backdrop for our ceremony (out of two 5′ dowels) as well as three 3 foot backdrops to layer behind the dessert buffet, so you might not need nearly that much.

I wanted a little bit of additional color that was closer to our real colors, so I ordered some fancy crepe paper from Castle in the Air, which has a much wider range. I picked out four shades of color and added a package of gold (which is not metallic-shiny and isn’t doublesided, but I still ended up loving the overall effect it added). With shipping, that cost $50. I bought too much, FYI.

And of course, I couldn’t resist having a bit of sparkle in there. The gold metallic fringe was from Oriental Trading Company, but I think you can get it lots of party stores. I ordered four of the curtains (double check the size – they are only 3ft wide!) to span our 10 foot ceremony backdrop for $25 (a little less, actually, because I searched for an online coupon that got me free shipping + a discount).

2. Cut your streamers.

With the cheap crepe paper, I used Jordan’s excellent tutorial on fringe-y streamers. So easy! You can also cut some straight pieces of varying sizes with pinking shears for a textured edge but no fringe. Just follow the tutorial but you only have to do the first step and use pinking shears instead of regular scissors.

The fancy crepe paper is THICK and it comes in rolls rather than folds. This made it much harder to work with and I didn’t end up incorporating as much of it as I would have liked. The most effective way to work with it was to unroll it and then fold it, but make the folds much deeper than the thin crepe paper. I ended up getting so frustrated trying to cut fringed streamers from this that I just cut strips of varying sizes using a rotary blade. Once you have a strip cut, gently stretch it out so you get more length from it.

You can do without the fancy paper altogether if you like, but I think it added a nice depth of color, even in the limited quantities I used it in. A little goes a long way, luckily!

As you’re creating your streamers, keep them in separate piles by color and shade. This makes it a little easier when you start assembling.

3. Assemble!

Getting the dowel in a good place to work was the hardest part for me! I tied mine with fishing line and hung it right under the blinds in my apartment and then worked on a stepstool. You could easily work with it on a table (cover it with paper or something first!), and avoid the hassle of finding somewhere to hang it. Just make sure you step back once in a while and check to see how it is looking when you hang it.

Start with a single shade and glue strips to the dowel at random(ish) intervals. For each piece you’ll want to use the glue gun to put glue on the dowel and then carefully press the strip onto the glue. Carefully! The paper is thin, and you can get burned right through it. Wear gloves if you have a tendency to burn yourself with hot glue. Don’t worry if it doesn’t look perfect at this point. You don’t want to use up ALL your paper right now, you’re just getting a good start on it.

Repeat with each of the remaining colors.

At this point, you should have a decent distribution of colors and you’ll just want to start layering and filling in as needed.

I needed our ceremony backdrop to be very full (it was covering a not so nice looking set of french doors) so I went back over it several times, always stepping back to see the overall effect once in a while.

The dessert buffet didn’t need quite as much coverage, so it took significantly less time and paper.

4. Optional – Add metallic fringe!

Apply the gold fringe to the back of the dowel. The fringe comes with a solid portion on the top, so I just tacked that down with hot glue applied directly to the dowel and then pressed the solid portion over it well (again, carefully!).

5. Pack it up

Voila! You have a gorgeous, enormous, fluffy backdrop and now you have to transport it somewhere (unless you are getting married in your living room, which is awesome). I was totally befuddled at this point. The solution we came up, that ended up working beautifully, was to spread out a clean dropcloth or sheet and lay the backdrop on top of it, spreading the streamers out straight out so that it looks like it would if it were hung. Then, starting with the dowel end, gently roll the streamers up, leaving the sheet on the ground for now. Don’t try to do this too tightly, you’re just rolling them gently. They barely weigh anything, so you’ll just have a fluffy streamer cigar. Now take one end of the sheet and wrap it around the streamers, rolling it until it completely encases them. Tuck the ends under or tie them off (loosely) and the streamers will transport easily and fluff right back into shape for the wedding.

6. Hang them

This will depend on your space, so make sure you work this detail out before you get started! We hung ours directly from the rafters at our venue, which meant all we needed was clear fishing line and a ladder. On the actual wedding day, we unrolled the streamers and tied the dowels to the rafters. We fluffed the streamers up and re-arranged them a bit and flipped some of the gold fringe over so that it was more visible in the front. Our ceremony backdrop was in a walkway, so we brought some ribbon and kept them tied back like curtains except during the actual ceremony, which made for a nice reveal when the backdrop actually came down (or so I assume, because I was waiting impatiently outside at the time!).

Total costs 

All in all, we spent about $130 on this project (which will be lower in most cases since you won’t have as much trial and error as I did) + 2 burned fingers (I’m a little careless with the glue gun) + 3 – 4 hours of my time and it was our biggest impact DIY. I know you probably aren’t supposed to say this about your own projects, but I absolutely LOVE how it turned out.

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We love it too! It’s so fun and so festive and so beautiful. The use of different colors and textures and fringe makes for a really outstanding focal point for any festive occasion! ESPECIALLY a marriage ceremony, of course. And… you can buy Rachel’s in the Marketplace if you’re quick!

Process photos by Rachel.
Wedding photos by Fresh in Love Photography.