Y’all, weddings are expensive! Even when you’re trying to throw a wedding on a budget, there are items that are unnecessarily pricey. Thankfully, that’s where DIY comes in!

Alex and I knew we wanted our wedding to be an intimate event at the bar where we first met. We knew we wanted it to be quirky and memorable. Above all, we just wanted folks to be able to relax and have fun! Handmade details fit right into our aesthetic, blending our unique personalities with our desire to avoid single-use items that aren’t-so-great for the environment. Here are five crafts we did last year that saved us major moolah in our budget and helped us make our wedding a little eco-friendly.

Painted Canvas Placemats

Difficulty: Easy Cost: Less than $1 per placemat

Our venue didn’t supply placemats, so if we wanted them, we’d need to provide them on our own. While there were plenty of affordable paper options, everything fabric started at a few dollars each. And a few dollars for 60 guests can add up quickly! My solution was to take an eco-friendly cotton drop cloth and paint it with artsy, abstract gobs of craft paint in our color scheme. After the whole drop cloth was dry, I traced out circles larger than our serving plates and cut each circle out of the thick canvas fabric. It probably took me three or four hours over the course of two nights, but I was really happy with the results and the savings. Each placemat was unique and brought our Seriously Nerdy Wedding color scheme to every table!

Paper Fan Backdrop

Difficulty: Easy.

Cost: Less than $.40 per fan

I wanted to bring our color scheme into the venue without overwhelming the space. I’d seen those lovely balloon arches online, but those were outside my budget for a professional to install, and beyond my skillset to install myself. Instead, I used that same concept of a splash of color in big, bold shapes to make a bunch of tissue paper fans that I could stick up on the walls and quickly recycle after the event. There were step-by-step instructions on Pinterest, and I bought tissue paper in bulk from Amazon in our color scheme. I ended up making way more of these than I needed in the months leading up to the wedding, so my advice would be to actually plan out how many of these you want and calculate accordingly.

Custom Deli Paper Serving Trays

Difficulty: Easy.

Cost: $0.18 per sheet of 3

My most “extra” design choice at the wedding was custom-printing sheets of deli paper to line our food serving trays during food service. It was absolutely unnecessary, but one of those little flourishes that delighted me from an event standpoint. Staying as eco-friendly as possible, I wanted to avoid single-use plastic but also bring some flair to the mini comfort food items that made up our entrees. My solution was to purchase bulk Amazon kraft paper serving boats and line them with custom food safe deli paper. I used patterns I’d created for the wedding invitations and found a vendor on Etsy who could produce them. When they arrived, we cut the papers down into three different sheets, tripling the variety of our serving dishes.

3D Printed Barrel Floral Centerpieces

Difficulty: Moderate

Cost: Less than $4 per barrel vase, and less than $20 per floral arrangement

Okay, okay. This one is leveled at “moderate difficulty” because you’ll need a 3D printer — or know someone who has a 3D printer. We knew that for our wedding inside the barrel-shaped Idle Hour, we should incorporate barrels where it made sense. But do you have any idea how expensive mini wooden barrels are?! I’ll save you a Google. They are not cheap. Instead, we found a 3D file for free online and sized it up to about 6 inches tall. We purchased four spools of PolyTerra PLA filament in matte black and spent several weeks printing vases for every table. The vases served double-duty as both a lovely floral centerpiece at each table, but also a base for our table numbers. (We simply used card holder sticks you’d normally use in a bouquet to hold double-sided table numbers.) Our friend Eric swept in as floral expert and helped arrange dozens of arrangements the morning of the event. As icing on the wedding cake, we were able to donate these to Idle Hour after the wedding for them to use at future events!

DIY Hotel Keychain Favors

Difficulty: Hard

Cost: Less than $2.50 per keychain

If you’re not a graphic designer, this one may not be as cost-effective or crafty for you, but this was certainly a fun project to tackle for me! After months of scrolling Pinterest trying to find a creative, relevant favor for our guests, we inadvertently stumbled upon the idea of retro hotel keychains. But not just any keychains, oh no. Nerdy pop culture hotel keychains. Customized for every guest’s favorite fandoms. The Leaky Cauldron from Harry Potter. Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel. The Great Muppet Caper’s Happiness Hotel. It turns out that the amazing people at Houston Acrylic were able to use their engraver to cut their lovely acrylic in-house at a very reasonable price. I went to work designing dozens of hotel keychains and they cut and delivered them like friggin’ rock stars. After they arrived, we wiped acrylic paint into the infills for contrast and buffed the surface clean with a cloth before looping a color-coordinating leather tassel and keyring into their loop. As guests arrived at the event, they were greeted by a key ring board with their custom keychain favor and their table number assignment. Not only was it a budget-friendly choice, our guests appreciated all the attention to detail.

The lesson, dear nerds: don’t shy away from bringing DIY into your wedding day. It’s 2024. The rule book has been thrown out the window. Society doesn’t get to dictate how much money you spend on your big day or how premium every element has to appear. If you can show off your personality, do something kind for the environment, and be creative all at the same time? I call that a win, yo.

Seriously Married: Five crafts that saved us money on our wedding