The Broke-Ass Bride: Bad-ass Wedding Inspiration on a Broke-Ass Budget

Guest Blogger: Rock n’ Roll Bride’s favorite weddings!

Hang onto your socks, peeps. My girl Kat from Rock n Roll Bride is bringing the pretty (and smart) today! Give her a warm welcome!
___________________

When Dana asked me to write a little something for you Broke-Ass Bride readers I thought what could be a better opportunity than to go through the blogging archives and dig out my all time favourite budget wedding -wise, DIY kick ass wedding awesomeness to share? I think us bloggers, who’ve been engrossed in all things wedding for quite a while now, might sometimes forget that not everyone will have seen everything we have – and that’s shocking – terrible almost. These weddings need to be seen and appreciated!

So I got my thinking hat on and decided that the best way to share these weddings in all their glory was to ask the people behind them to share their secrets, tip and tricks, ideas which made their weddings great. So behold, 5 of my favourite budget conscious, diy weddings from the last few years.

♥ Jose & Dani’s wedding sent me through the roof with excitement when I first laid eyes on it. The retro styling, the over the top excitement and the rockabilly pink hair! But just how did they make it all happen?

Jose & I wanted to make our wedding very “us,” while the super-thrifty gal in me wanted to do it as inexpensively as possible. Our beach ceremony was free, and the beautiful scenery needed no decoration. I created our save-the-dates and invitations myself using Photoshop. My crafty mom made my veil, boutonnieres, and a carnival banner. My dad’s eighteen piece swing band played and many of the members played for just a meal. Our amazing photographer, a photo student at my university, was found through craigslist.

♥ Abigail & Michael’s wedding was so gorgeous I couldn’t wait to blog it. The sparkles sent me crazy! Completely different to Jose & Dani’s but just as inspiring!

I have always been a thrifty girl so when my now husband proposed the second-hand inclined wheels of my brain immediately starting turning. I knew I wanted a unique wedding that wouldn’t break the bank.  Sure, we splurged on several elements of our big day, but we would not have been able to do so had we gone the traditional wedding budget route. We mixed almost all of the traditional delegated expenses and hopped on the do-it-yourself train. Traditional florists can cost hundreds to thousands of dollars for arrangements and bouquets so we nixed them and opted for wholesale potted plants and pumpkins. We made bouquets and boutonnières from store bought flowers purchased the day before.   Our centrepieces were mismatched collections of vases, flowers and spray painted pumpkins instead of large expensive arrangements.   Decorations were mostly crafted, from thrift stores or stalked until they were retired tosale racks.  Planning and time is key to a thrifty wedding. With a few strokes of the keyboard you can easily find a tutorial teaching you how to do something you might pay someone else loads of money to do.We also saved money by catering our own wedding with the help of many friends.  One of my cousins is a DJ so we used his equipment along with a playlist I made for our music.   I bought my $470 dress at a non-bridal dress store saving tons of money and I made my veil from a vintage headpiece my Mother once wore.  By saving on all of these elements were able to splurge on some unforgettable elements like our fabulous photographer and the photo booth we used for favors and entertainment.  It was a lot of work but in the end it was definitely worth it.

♥ Rhiannon & Ben’s British wedding was one of the first I saw when planning my own wedding that I got the green eyed monster over! I just wished I was as creative and full of brilliant ideas! Rhiannon and I have since become great friends and often meet up for a coffee and to discuss all things wedding (she continued her wedding obsession by starting her own stationary company – Under the Cherry Moon).

Looking back, planning our wedding was a total labour of love. We had a comparatively small budget (£12k), 90 guests, 30 kids, all needing accommodation. A certain amount of pressure to be traditional, to live up to expectations of previous weddings of family and friends. All wrapped up within our overwhelming desire to have a fun wedding reflective of our tastes and style. What’s a girl to do? D.I.Y.

I bought reams of cheap card and designed, printed and cut out all of our stationery and paper goods at home. We made gift bags for each hotel room, with a weekend itinerary, snacks, water, painkillers… The men wore their own suits and added ties we’d got them. I made fascinators for the maids, and their dresses came from TK Maxx at £20 each. Bags stuffed with games amused the kids for hours, and they all loved the wedding activity book I designed for them. We bought lasting rose bushes as gifts for the mums, gave silly prizes for a golf competition, opened the floor for speeches, had a tower of French Fancies. Husband even made a ring pillow with some previously hidden sewing machine skills. It was a blast, and it was us.

♥ What I loved the moss about Katie & Clinton’s wedding was not only all the quirky details and the pure passion and individuality that had gone into it, but it was the photography. Isn’t it fantastic?

Our wedding was completely & totally us. We are both artists & wanted to put our special touches on everything. We DIYed as much as we could from the invites to the centre-pieces. We had many homemade touches including gingham ribbons & table overlays & sweet little pillows & fabric touches everywhere. My mother & mother in law did all of the sewing for those.  My husband Clinton is a glass blower, so we had blown glass flowers as favors, and from me, photo stickers and temporary tattoos with our name & date on them. Lots of photo touches everywhere including polaroid table number & photo paper dolls of us. I wore my mother’s wedding dress from 1976, although we did alter it some to make it a bit more modern. My mother was so flattered that I would want too wear her dress, so it was very special to us both. I am a photographer and an art teacher so of course we had to have an arts & craft table & a photo booth. Hula Hoops, Badminton and bubbles were fun for everyone as was the local jazz band that we hired because they were a fantastic real jazz band, not a wedding cover band. But the very very best part of our wedding was the love & support we felt surrounded by everyone and our beautiful Buddhist ceremony where I couldn’t take my eyes off my husband. This was our day.

♥ Meegan & Jean-Louis’ wedding was certainly one with a difference! The couple shocked their friends and family by turning their engagement party into their wedding! No one knew that they had planned this all along!

I am a hair stylist so I see quite a few brides a year- lucky for me I have been inspired by the incredible strong women in my life and in my chair daily! I think the most budget conscious thing I did while planning our wedding was keeping my husband to be in mind – He wanted to get married not spend a year of his life watching me freak out over all the “to do’s” of planning a wedding. By the way we planned our wedding in 3 months…it can be done!!! So we kept it simple and straight forward; questioning every tradition and idea making sure that what we did on our day was for us (not because a bride magazine told us to do so…)

So let’s be honest being on a budget sucks and it makes everything really difficult…on the flip side of that it forced me to remain inspired and creative through the whole process. We shopped around for the cheapest everything and when “it” was too much we went back to the drawing board to think of a different way to do it. Here are some $ saving examples: The wedding was in a back yard, we used a simple card stock invitation, our cake tasted better than it looked (it was smooth white frosting 3 tiers with a cake topper-no fancy creations!), buffet style Italian food made by my dad (he’s an amazing cook), the centre-pieces were home made by a friend, my grandma, mother-in-law, my husband and myself…we got the flowers at a wholesale flower shop and I must say not only was it fun to do but they looked amazing (huge savings!)-my bouquet was made by a professional but I made my brides maids bouquets, my dress was on the cheaper side of the dress prices and my jewellery was my moms. The areas we spent the doe in are the areas that really matter like the photographer, the open bar and the staff. My guests gave me amazing feed back because it was relaxed, inspired and just slightly out of the box. Our wedding was amazing and we could do it 1000 different ways but I am so grateful that we are not in debt over it! So to the budget bride: don’t worry if you can’t afford your initials on the cocktail napkins, nobody cares anyway…

♥ You might remember Hannah & Landon if you’ve been wedding obsessed (like me) for a while now. Their wedding made waves all over blog-land mainly because people were trying to work out if there wedding was a recent one or if their shots were dug out from the 1970s. Their simple boat wedding is definitely one of my all time favorites.

Our wedding was tossed together in three weeks. Initially we had planned on a private exchange of vows with just our parents present and having a big friend filled party on our first anniversary. I think it started heading in a different direction when we were shopping for shoes (which proved fruitless and we ended up barefoot) and I had a swooning moment when I realized that I would need a lady friend present at this ceremony and so Landon decided he would need his best friend and his best friend would come with his girlfriend and mine with her significant other. After that we just started inviting friends that we’d bump into that week and it slowly grew into the intimate and wonderful gathering that it was. My dress I drew out and brought to a friend of mine that sewed beautiful and delicate garments (sadly she is no longer working on her sewing projects but has moved on to something equally delightful and a great deal more delicious – cooking!) she did a magnificent job even adding “something old” – glass buttons that belonged to her grandmum. Landon had his white vintage suit altered to fit and borrowed a pink button-up from a local vintage store that we were chummy with. After a beautiful sunny ceremony on the beach we all hopped aboard a lovely yacht (courtesy of my Dad) and watched the sunset from the sea, enjoyed delicious beverages, salmon and cupcakes and jams from our laptop on the top deck. At the end of the night instead of tossing my bouquet I took it apart and gave flowers to all my beautiful lads and ladies. It was a truly magical (and with the exception of the yacht cheap) day and I wouldn’t change a single thing about it!