1.09.2012

Craft Confessions | Super Cheap Wedding Centerpieces

I have an exciting secret to share with you. As of today, January 9th, I have been married for exactly six months! I realize that doesn't seem like much, especially compare to the two years My Main Man and I dated before getting married, but I'm still excited. We've made it through half a year! So in honor of this festive occasion, I decided to walk down memory lane and share a really cheap centerpiece we used for our wedding reception: candlesticks!

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I had seen so many cute wedding centerpieces including big flower-balls set on candlesticks, and I had also seen pretty tissue paper poms online, so I decided to combine the two to look like this:

Beautiful pictures courtesy of Shutterchic Photography
How did I do this? Well the tissue paper poms, besides requiring a decent chunk of time from two bridesmaids, MMM, and myself, were actually really easy to make. Check out the Martha Stewart tutorial here. The I cut a few flower arranging dowels in half and hot glued one end to the center of each pom. Then they went into a big box until the wedding.

For the candlesticks, there was no way I was going to bleed out the cash stores try to charge for them, whether glass, wood, metal, or any other material. Instead, I made my way to my local thrift store and bought a really old, rather out-of-style wooden chair for $6 if I remember correctly. I chopped the chair up, separating each curvaceous spindle and chair leg from the body of the chair. I then sandblasted each stick to remove the worn stain (but you could accomplish the same thing with a sanding block and a little more time). I sanded each end of the stick to try and create as level a surface as possible to connect to the top and bottom of the stick later.

From the seat of the chair and a spare piece of wood I cut out two circles for each candlestick, one just slightly larger than the stick diameter (about 1.5" in diameter) and a base at a much larger size, which were anywhere from 2.5" to 4" in diameter.In the the small circles, I drilled a hole slightly larger than the dowels on my tissue paper poms. After giving all the pieces a good sand, I glued them together with wood glue and clamped the pieces together to cure. The next day, I coated each stick in off-white spray paint (to match my wedding colors).



After putting a pom in each candlestick, I had super cheap and awesome centerpieces! Even after our wedding, I've loved using these sticks to brighten up a boring tabletop or corner of a room and I have found lots of ways to use them. Happy Monday friends!

Some more lovely pictures of these centerpieces in action, courtesy of Shutterchic Photography

2 comments:

  1. Love love love! I'm going to try making one today!

    ReplyDelete
  2. How cute! These wedding centerpieces look adorable, thank you very much for sharing this post on my Girly Mondays party and best wishes for your marriage, I hope it will last a life time :)

    ReplyDelete

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