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.