The altar made with paper garland, rope, and fabric, hung for the happy couple to use as their backdrop. Macrame string displayed hot pink rocks in glass votives to brighten the middle layer. Stunning, right?

Loving the geometric patterns on the suite, designed by The Creative Parasol. The rsvp card check boxes read: HECK YES or aw, shucks.

Fun centerpiece of protea, garden roses, and ranunculus was assembled over a handcrafted leopard print tablecloth with white tassels.

They even included piñatas into their shoot! Take a peek at those geometric ones below. Nice twist on the traditional.

Ok, we’re ready for the weekend to get here. Oh yeah, and Summer too!

Photography: Paige Newton Phototgraphy / Concept + styling + rentals + floral design: Sweet Sunday Events / Paper: The Creative Parasol / Cakes: Polkadots Cupcake Factory / Hair: Erica Rae

Firstly – assemble your supplies. If you purchase a DIY kit, you’re all set! All you need is scissors and a glue gun. If you’re purchasing your own supplies, gather a bunch of feathers (in different colors and sizes), a handful of bamboo skewers, and whatever trim you’d like to use to finish them off. We used gold, because we love gold. But you could totally use anything you like.

You can make a bunch of the exact same stirrer, or you can make all sorts of different ones that go together, like we did. If you purchased the kit, you’ll see that feather sizes and shapes vary, so you’ll have to figure out which go together best.

Start with your biggest feather first and position it in the direction you like. Add a spot of hot glue, and then affix the feather to the top of the stirrer.

Repeat with the second biggest…

… on down the line until you have them all arranged as you like them.

To add the trim, squeeze out a spot of glue at the lower part of the feather tips.

Attach the trim and wind it up the stirrer until it covers the messy part of the feathers. You might want to add another spot of glue midway, if you think it’s necessary. Then one more spot of glue at the top to attach the end of the trim.

Snip the remaining trim away from the stick, and voila! You can cut the stirrers down to size if you’d like them to match the height of your glasses. Or if you want to use these little beauties on a cake or cupcakes, leave the pointy end intact.

Happy crafting! Remember, our kits will be on sale tomorrow starting at 9AM Pacific. If you’re not on our mailing list and you want to be reminded the second our sales are live, add your email in the sign up field in the right column.

Here’s a little peek of what’s to come:

Lots more pretty inspiration, and more importantly – shopping – coming your way tomorrow!

Sarah’s dress is from Elsie and Emma’s Red Velvet Shop. After she had described what she was looking for, the Red Velvet gals went to town scouring their store for the perfect dress. They found this vintage beauty, but it was floor length. A little snip snip in alterations to make it shorter and the dress hunt was over. And, if you can believe it (we never do!), this was the only dress Sarah even tried on!

Sarah had sprigs of baby’s breath pinned in her hair to look like a headband. Affordable + adorable!

Their dessert table has us so ready for Thanksgiving eating tomorrow!

We spy with our little eye, Elsie + Jeremy. Fun fact: Doren (the groom) is Elsie’s brother!

Congrats Sarah + Doren!

We hope you all have a fabulous, food coma-esque holiday!

Photography: Janae Hardy / Venue: Edgewater Beach Resort / Food: Bride’s father, Bill Lockhart / Desserts: Emma / Hair: Coral Gibson from Dana’s Cutters & More in Cabool, MO / Everything else: Handmade by bride + friends / Bride’s dress: Red Velvet Shop / Tights: Merona from Target / Shoes: Urban Outfitters / Earrings: Francesca’s / Groom’s suit: Urban Outfitters / Tie: Thrifted

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.

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.