Every time I log onto Instagram or Facebook, it seems like another friend of mine either just married or engaged or starting planning their wedding. Weddings are such an exciting event; it's a new beginning in a relationship.
I really love going to weddings because besides getting to celebrate with our friends, I feel like I get to know them a bit better. I get to see each couple's individual style, story, and preferences through what wedding traditions they include, how big their wedding is, their attire, and the decorations they picked out.
I loved everything about our wedding. I'm a planner so having an entire year to plan out the biggest day of mine life was a dream come true. One of my favorite parts about planning our wedding was deciding on all the colors and decorations. It was so much fun.
The only sad part about spending all that time, energy, and money picking out everything for our wedding is that usually when weddings are over, it all gets packed into a box or given or thrown away. Ryan and I made, painted, and put together most of our wedding decorations in order to save some money. After the wedding, when I was looking at the pile of wedding memories in the middle of our living room floor, I was a little hesitant to have it just disappear either into a box or off to Goodwill.
I decided to take some of the different elements from our wedding day and turn them into household decor so I could always have something in the room to remind me how lucky I am to be married to my husband and the beautiful day we shared at the beginning of our marriage.
I thought some other newlywed brides might feel the same way I did about getting rid of their wedding stuff and figured I'd share some of the ways I reused my wedding decorations. I've also included in this list some other ways I found on the internet to repurpose decorations and other elements from your wedding.
Flowers
If you have real flowers in your bouquet, you can take some of the flowers and press them. This is cool because then you can either cover them with clear tape or laminate them and make bookmarks or you can glue them onto a canvas or piece of glass and make a beautiful piece of art for your mom. You can also make potpourii and place it in a bowl or a vase to have a nice smelling reminder of your big day.
If you end up going with fake flowers, place them in a vase and use them to bring a pop of color and a wonderful reminder of your big day to any room. You can also use them in art projects like shadow boxes (boutonnieres are great for shadow boxes) or you can glue them to the glass in a picture frame or a mirror and make a fun flower frame.
Centerpieces
We had lanterns filled with fairy lights and covered in little white fake flowers and greenery at our wedding. I gave away most of our centerpieces to a friend of mine who is getting married this September, but I did keep one for sentimental reasons. Currently, it sits next to my bed as a little reading light whenever Ryan goes to bed before me.
If you have centerpieces on the larger side, you can use them as room accents by placing them on the ground underneath windows or next to dressers or if they're outdoor friendly, put them on your front porch. For centerpieces on the smaller size, you can put them on shelves behind picture frames and other small household decorations.
Sweetheart Table
Our sweetheart table decor was a Mr & Mrs. wood sign that I bought off Amazon, a black table runner, and a string of fairy lights. The fairy lights went to be apart of our Christmas decoration and actually was the lights for our Christmas tree last year. The Mr. & Mrs. sign is currently sitting on our bookshelf next to the TV along with our military ball pictures and a champagne scented candle.
From what I've seen from Pinterest and all of the wedding I've been to, most people just stick to flowers and fairy lights. I've already covered what you can do with flowers, but for the fairy lights, you can use it to light up a mirror or a room that doesn't get a lot of light.
Signage
I did mirror signs for my wedding, but I've seen everything from wood to the glass. I kept our "Welcome to our Happily Ever After" sign and am saving it to one day hang it up in our first home, mostly because I don't have any wall space to hang it now. The other mirrors I soaked the Sharpie paint marker off with Windex, and I integrated a couple of them into a collage with some wedding pictures and one of our engagement signs on our bedroom wall.
There isn't really a ton of ways to keep signs like seating charts or food menus that make sense, but if you have like a sign program with all of your wedding details instead of doing the paper ones, those signs are nice to hang up on a wall somewhere as a memory.
Cards
Personally, I don't know why including cards in presents are still a thing because I have so many cards from birthdays and holidays sitting in a plastic container in my study. We got a lot of cards from our wedding because we didn't do a registry since we already have everything we need due to us living together and asked for cash instead.
I haven't done anything with our cards yet, but at some point I would like to scrapbook all of them into our guest book along with some of the photos from our big day. The nice thing about wedding cards is that they're all so beautiful and fancy so they're perfect for art projects. I've seen these super cool looking collages and wedding card booklets on Pinterest. If you have way more time and patience then I do, you should totally check them out.
Cake Toppers
I personally don't remember where I put our cake topper after we got back from our wedding, but if I did know where it was, it would probably be somewhere in our living room next to some wedding pictures.
Some places to put your cake topper could be on your mantle (if you have a fireplace), on the back of your stove (we have a little space that I currently keep extra mugs on), or if you have a glass case or TV stand, you could put it in there with some other fun wedding mementos. Also, the shadow box. If it's small enough or you bought a really big shadow box, you could put it in there.
Wedding Attire
If you're like me, you might just pack your dress and veil away because you want the option to be able to pass it on to your daughter one day. My wedding dress is currently hanging up in my closet because we don't have a ton of extra storage space right now.
If you want to enjoy your dress for a bit longer, I've seen some people who have dyed and shortened theirs to make a fun little party dress, you could have someone turn your dress into lingerie or baby clothes, or if you're super talented, you could make it into a quilt.
For veils and your grooms attire, hopefully he bought a suit he can just wear again; Ryan wore his Army dress blues so that was easy for us. A fun thing you can do though add his wedding day tie and your veil can be put into the shadow box we've been mentioning throughout this post.
Well, I hope this gives you some inspiration for different ways to reuse the decor from your big day and helps bring you all the joy in reliving your wedding day over and over again. I wish you all the happiest and longest marriages.
Take a shot for all of the stress involved in wedding planning and toast to all of the beautiful new marriages happening this year,
Cheers,
Kristaleagh
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