How to Cut Wedding Costs with Haberdashery

Wedding fever tends to sweep over every new bride-to-be, groom-to-be, their families and friends. The planning of the big day can be exciting, a little daunting, sometimes stressful and at times, daunting. With so much to think about, it can be hard to know where to start, what you want to do and how you’re going to do it!

However, one of the biggest concerns when planning your wedding is usually budget. How can you make your wedding as beautiful and lovely as you want it but keep it within a budget? Where are the best places to cut costs?

Whilst we’re not wedding or budget planners, we can help advise you on how you can cut costs on your decorations, help to execute your theme by yourself and where to begin with planning the aesthetic of your wedding – all through the wonders of haberdashery!

Pinning Down a Colour Scheme

The first thing to decide when considering the aesthetics of your big day is your colour scheme! This will then help you choose your flowers, bridesmaid dresses, accessories, table centre pieces, button holes, groomsmen suits and your decorations! Once this is nailed down, your vast, crazy amount of options will be whittled down making it much easier and hopefully will streamline your planning.

When choosing your colour scheme, we recommend picking colours that harmonise with each other such as lilacs and gentle pinks, greys and dusty pinks, pale greens and blues that you can then pick from a gradient of colours for all your decorations and other bits.

Table Centre Pieces

These can end up costing you a lot of money if provided by your venue or external wedding stylist when you can in fact make them yourself! You don’t have to make these incredibly extravagant – as long as they fit with your colour scheme and you like them, that’s all that matters.

Flowers tend to work best for centre pieces so you could simply put some of your flowers into several jars decorated with ribbon or lace and you will have some lovely, rustic table centre pieces.

If you do want to do create something more statement, you could choose longer stemmed flowers that you’re not using elsewhere in your wedding décor such as a sunflower, lilies or even orchids and choose tall vases to make your centre pieces stand out more. If you don’t want to use flowers (they’re expensive!) you can put candles in your jars or vases and use plastic beads or pearls to glamourise them.

Bridesmaids Gifts

These days, it’s custom to give your bridesmaids a little something when you ask them to take on the big duty and again on the actual day. You can easily cut costs here by creating something personal and unique for the special ladies in your life. Depending on your haberdashery abilities, you can create a number of different beautiful and sentimental pieces for your bridesmaids.

For example:

• A cushion cover with a special message on
• A handmade coin purse
• Craft a piece of wood and carve or laser it with your message
• A handmade necklace

Venue Decorations

The big one! Whilst it’s advisable to rent your table cloths, chair covers and lighting, there are personal touches you can create yourself for your wedding – particularly for a more rustic or vintage style décor.

You can find props from friends, family and your own attic that you can customise. A few ideas we have are:

• Using an old wooden step-ladder can be repainted and be covered in flowers and polaroid photos
• Hang old jars from trees and put tea lights in them
• Create bunting from patchwork squares and sew letters onto them to spell ‘Mr and Mrs’ or ‘Happily Ever After’
• Use teapots and tea cups to decorate tables and bars and put flowers or candles in them
• Hang long pieces of string around the venue with photos and flowers pegged to them
• Stack tables with old books to then place notices on or as a platform for flowers
  
  

Wedding Favours

Wedding favours are a lovely and personal way of saying thank you to your guests for making the effort to share your special day with you. Again, these can end up costing a fair amount so where you can create your own, we recommend you do! Some ideas we’ve come up include:

• Making your own candles by putting bought candle wax into small jars and creating your own labels
• Put together a little sack of sweets in a piece of pretty cotton fabric
• Put sweets such as love hearts into a jar
• Make your own small, romantic themed baked goods
• Create a ‘Hangover Kit’ in either a box you make yourself, or a little fabric pouch and fill with a little bag of ground coffee, a couple of paracetamol and some chocolate 

These are just a handful of ideas that we think you can use to help cut costs on certain parts of your wedding as well as help to inspire your décor - we hope we've helped!