The World Of DIY

When we first started the wedding planning process, I didn’t even know what DIY stood for – which is Do It Yourself. After lurking on the Knot boards for a while I found the DIY boards, and learned how many ways you could save money by making stuff yourself. The added benefit, other than the savings, is that these little projects make the wedding more personal.

So I did a little research and decided our first DIY projects would be the monogram and save the date magnets. I’ve always loved putting up friends save the date magnets or cards on our fridge, and got excited thinking that people would be putting ours up on their respective fridges! I should probably mention that Mr. E comes from a very creative family. Mr. E’s mom was so wonderful to take my old college shirts and make them into this keepsake masterpiece below. I absolutely love it and what better way to keep my memories from college since I no longer wear t-shirts on a regular basis (yay corporate America)



Not only is Mr. E a lot more creative than me, he’s also a wiz at the computer (has one computer degree and is currently working on another one). So I was more than happy to put these two projects in his hands. We decided from the beginning that our wedding colors would be blue and green since those are our favorite colors, so Mr. E went to work on the monogram. After a couple examples, and input from our families we finally decided on this one:
For some of our future projects we’re going to add a border around the monogram so it’s easier to cut out (you’ll see what I mean later). I was so excited to have this first piece of our wedding complete!

Next up was the save the date magnet. While reading other Knotties (girls on the knot website/boards) I learned of this amazing little machine called the Xyron 500. This machine will take whatever you put through it (up to a 5 inch size) and make it into a magnet, sticker or laminate it. Daddy Elephant was generous enough to pay for the machine, so we headed to Michael’s and used a 40% off coupon to purchase it (gotta love coupons!). Mr. E designed the magnet layout in Illustrator to tie in the travel theme we’ll have at the reception. Again this was another trial and error process to come up with the design and wording that we wanted, but we loved the finished product. For the example we printed off on normal copy paper, but we’ll use a type of cardstock when we do the real thing. Once printed off, we simply run it through the Xyron machine with the magnet cartridge and out pops a laminated magnet!



We’ll be designing a card with hotel information and our wedding website that these magnets will be sent in. More on that once we finalize a design. All in all I’m very happy with our first DIY projects, and can’t wait to tackle some more during this planning process.

Did you incorprate any DIY projects into your planning?