Five Fun DIY Ideas for the Green Wedding

Are you planning a green wedding? If so, you are one of the many couples today who are doing their part to help the environment. While the primary reason to have an eco-friendly wedding is to help the environment, couples are finding they’re also spending less money than their traditional wedding counterparts. The great thing is that any wedding can be made more eco-friendly with very little effort. Here are five, fun DIY ways to green up your wedding:

Wedding Stationery

Wedding stationery can do quite a bit of damage to your wedding budget, but it doesn’t have to! You can stay green, save money, and have fun with your wedding stationery. Have you considered creating your own wedding stationery? You can! Everything from your wedding invitations, to your wedding program, to your thank-you cards. Look for post-consumer or recycled paper, create a design on your computer, and print them off yourself using eco-friendly printer ink. In this way, you can control costs by only printing what you need, when you need it.

Flower Bouquets

Flowers are a must-have for many brides, but the cost can be quite prohibitive. Rather than paying a florist to do all of the arranging for you, consider designing your own bouquets. For one, you’ll be able to hand select your flowers at a local organic flower farm, rather than purchasing flowers that have been imported from overseas. For two, designing your own flower bouquets isn’t as hard as you might think. The key is to keep the design simple and the size of the bouquet small. Consider carrying a handful of mixed wildflowers, or a variety of long-stemmed blooms tied with a simple bow. Your bouquets do not have to be elaborate to be beautiful.

Reception Entertainment

Rather than hire a DJ or a band, create your own play discs and have friends and family members take turns on music duty. Or you can go the iPod route and have endless music ready to play at the touch of a button. Just be sure to have an adequate amount of amplifiers and speakers on hand. Also, when you’re choosing the music to play, remember to diversify the tempos and styles of the music. However, this is a great way to reduce the cost of entertainment.

Wedding Favors

While many eco-conscious couples are choosing to not give wedding favors to their guests, there are ways to keep with this tradition, DIY, and save cash all at the same time. Consider collecting favorite recipes from both sides of the family and creating a small cookbook you can share with your guests. Another great idea is to interview family members for stories of weddings past and include these, along with a few photos from the weddings themselves, as a lovely and sentimental wedding favor.

Honeymoon at Home

While most couples would love to dash off to some exotic destination for their honeymoon, these types of honeymoons can be very expensive, and sometimes it’s difficult to find green lodging away from home. If money is tight, or if you just prefer to keep your honeymoon local, then you should consider planning a honeymoon at home. Truly make it like a honeymoon, though! Unplug the phone for the duration of your “trip,” plan special outings and meals, and stay away from any and all real-life tasks (such as paying bills, beginning your thank-you cards, etc.).

There are so many ways you can incorporate your eco-friendly ideals into your wedding and save money by using DIY techniques. While DIY is not for everyone, the above five ideas are simple and fun, and most couples should find it easy to incorporate one or two of them into their wedding planning.

Tag: Windsor Ontario Green Wedding Chatham Wedding Sarnia Wedding London Wedding