My sister-in-law, Lynsey, my mom, and I spent an evening about a month before the wedding making these awesome lace and twine candles. We all spent months collecting different shaped bottles from salsa, olives, jam, pasta sauce, etc. Talk about eco-friendly! If that isn't enough re-using for you, the catering staff liked the candles so much they took them for another wedding that was coming up for them in a few weeks. Nothing seems to go to waste on Orcas Island anyway. Any food that was left over was donated to the food bank. Not to mention, we placed a box of leftover lavender on the corner of what seemed to be a fairly quiet area on the island, and within 15 minutes the whole box was gone!
We used a artist sketchbook for our guestbook and simply tied some burlap ribbon (given to us by a fabric store owner in Carrboro, NC as a wedding gift!) around the front. We set a polaroid camera out for people to take pictures and got some decorative tape in our wedding colors from cutetape.com for people to tape their photos in the guestbook. One piece of advice....have a person designated to man the guestbook for at least the first part of the evening. At the beginning, people didn't get it and just signed the book.
We also hung photos from twine at various spots around the hall. People really enjoyed looking through the pictures of us together, us as kids, as well as the pictures we posted of us with the family and friends that were at the wedding.
Our friend, Dani, designed the most awesome invitations for us. All materials were recycled and we had guests RSVP at our website to save paper and cost on postage. She used a photo I took of a Madrona tree (which are all over the island and happen to be the trees the surround the patio on which we got married) as a starting point. We found the perfect font for the invitations by exploring free fonts on the internet. We had them printed by an eco-friendly printing company here in the Triangle area, Barefoot Press. As a final touch, we tied some hemp cord in a bow around the invitations. Super pleased with the end product and our invites (plus recycled envelopes) ended up costing about $1.54 a piece! Granted they aren't letterpress and super fancy, but they were unique and totally fit with the personality of our wedding.
Also, we ended up using Dani's Madrona tree image on all the wedding menus, as well as our trail mix thank you/wedding favors for our guests. We had a trail mix bar at our welcome picnic at Moran State Park, but ended up having a lot left over. We put some trail mix favor bags out on the guestbook table at the wedding and still had some left over!!
Whew! I'm exhausted thinking about all these DIY projects but it was definitely worth it! People seemed to enjoy the personal touch of the decorations and it was just fun to see my creativity at work (because, unfortunately, my day job doesn't allow for much creativity!)
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