Cute Sign for a wedding...

This was pretty simple.
My family is huge and my husband's family is not so big.  My sister-in-law sent me a picture with this saying about two months before the wedding.  I loved it!! So, instead of having an awkward looking setup of chairs for the ceremony I made this!!

You need: 1 large easel, 1 large bulletin board (or chalk board if you want to spend a little extra$), white chalk and black acrylic paint and paint brush.

I bought the black framed bulletin board, black acrylic paint, paint brush and chalk from Walmart for less than $20, and I found the wrought iron easel on Craigslist for $40 (most like this brand new are much more expensive and I was on a budget), and this easel matches our home decor, so I can put it to use after the wedding.

1. I placed the bulletin board on the easel and wrote the quote in marker on the brown cork to make sure I could fit it all, and to help measure letters when I wrote it in chalk.  2. I painted the entire area of cork black.  I did 2 coats of paint.  3. Once the paint dried I wrote the quote.  Unfortunately it's not a chalk board, so if I made a mistake, it didn't erase well... however, I did have extra paint so I had "black-out" and once it dried I re-wrote it.  4. To make the sign a bit more personal I tacked on a picture of my husband and I.

It worked out great!!  Family sat where ever they wanted.  Now I have this great easel that I plan on blowing up one of our wedding photos to display in our home.

Coffee Filter Flowers - Wedding Centerpieces

I was in a time crunch and needed to make 100 of these for my centerpieces, so I created my own instructions with what materials I had... and I was on a budget, paying for a wedding.  The link below takes you to a different take on creating these which I think are pretty good too if you have the time.
http://littlebirdiesecrets.blogspot.com/2012/03/spring-coffee-filter-flowers-tutorial.html

What I did....

Materials: Coffee filters, wooden skewers (grocery store), green paint, stapler and staples, glue gun, glue sticks and food coloring of your choice if you don't want just white and a spray bottle.  (All fairly in expensive... I made over 100 of these flowers for my wedding.)

****First I painted all of my skewers (stems) green.  I stuck them in a piece of cardboard and painted them.  I guess you could lay them down and paint one side then the other when it's dried.

TO THE FLOWERS!
1. Count 8 filters and keep them stacked together. **You could do more filters for bigger/thicker flowers, but that also makes it difficult to push the skewer through.

2. Staple the filters together in the center (or near center, doesn't have to be perfect... what flower is?)

3. Take a skewer and push it through the filters next to the staple.

4. Use you glue gun and put some glue at about 1inch down the skewer on the inner part of the coffee filters.  Then push the filters up to the glue can dry connect the skewer and the filters.

5. Turn it over and put a ring of glue around the skewer at the bottom of the filters for additional support and let dry.

6. Time to crunch!  Starting with the inner most filter, bring it together and wrap your fist around it to crunch it.  Do this to every layer.  Don't be afraid to really crunch it... these you can fluff back out and re-crunch over and over again until you get your desired look.

Your result should look like this!! Not finished yet!

 7. Now you fluff it out.  You spread out the filters in a "fluffing" sort of way.  I don't know how else to explain that, but if you keep doing that then your flower will look like....

(optional) 8. If you want to color your flower, simply choose your favorite food color and mix it with water in a spray bottle.  Depending on how light or dark you want the color to be will vary in how much food coloring you use.  I recommend spraying each flower individually if you want the whole flower colored.  I wanted really red flowers, so I used A LOT of red food coloring... it pretty much looked like fake blood in a spray bottle. (because I needed 100 flowers, I made all of the flowers first and had this bright idea to "plant them" in my yard and just spray them outside where it was OK to make a mess... This was great to get the tops of the flowers, but in the end I had to individually spray each flower for touch-ups)

MY WEDDING....

I used artificial greenery (on sale 50% off at Michael's), jewels/gems (also 50% sale at Michael's) to fill the vases (and keep flowers and table numbers in place) all placed in vases I bought from The Dollar Tree.  It sounds cheap, but they turned out BEAUTIFUL!!  Centerpieces can be very expensive if it's not included in your wedding package.  We did a lot of decorating on our own (me, mom, grandma and bridesmaids).  When you add it up, as centerpieces these were not too expensive and we were on a budget.  Now since we did these ourselves I have a ton of greenery, red jewels.gems and red flowers for whatever DIY projects I come across!!