Unique Handcrafted Gift for Wedding Attendants: Ring Bearer or Flower Girl Bear

We wanted to give a unique but inexpensive gift to our flower girls and ring bearer to thank them for being in our wedding. I came up with the idea to make clothes for stuffed animals that looked like their outfits for our wedding. I found ten inch teddy bears really inexpensively and then sewed the little outfits myself out of scraps.

The fabric and patterns you choose would of course depend on the style of clothing your flower girl or ring bearer is wearing. But that is one of the great things about this gift idea, it is so easily customizable to your own wedding. You could even make miniature versions of the ring pillow and bouquets/baskets that the children were to carry if you wanted.

I know at least the flower girls really liked this gift and played with them a lot. And this was one of the most just plain fun projects to make for the wedding.

DIY Manly Ring Bearer Pillow: Handcrafted Ring Pillow in the Style of the Groomsmen Suits

It has been quite a while since I've done a wedding related post, but I thought today I'd try to share about another thing we did in our wedding that was rather unique. When looking at ideas for ring pillows, I kept thinking how girly they all looked for a boy to carry. So I designed my own "manly" version keeping it in the style of the clothes the groomsmen were to wear.

The main part of the pillow is black. I actually made it out of the scraps from hemming the new suit we bought for my husband, but any sturdy black fabric would do. I then made a white band of fabric to go around the square black pillow. I used scraps of white satin from sewing my dress, but plain white cotton would also work. I sewed the white band onto the pillow at the edges, so the ring bearer could slip his hand under the back of the band to hold it easily. I also sewed on a small white button to make the white more resemble a shirt. Lastly, I created a silver satin tie like those the groomsmen would wear and sewed it on top with a silver ribbon to hold the rings. Of course you can easily customize this idea to match any style of groomsmen clothing for your own wedding. I am sure a traditional tux ring pillow would be really cute as well, no matter what the groomsmen were wearing.

I was quite happy with how the ring pillow turned out, and our ring bearer looked very handsome (although he would have been handsome no matter what the ring pillow looked like).

Handcrafted Wedding Favors: Delicate Crocheted Bookmarks

Another of my favorite wedding favors that we gave away at our wedding were these beautiful crocheted bookmarks. I can crochet, but since I was already sewing my wedding dress and doing a lot of other project for the wedding in about six months time, I asked my grandma to crochet these for us.

My grandma is so sweet and graciously agreed. I found some free patterns online and gave them to my grandma along with ribbon in our wedding colors. I think she actually had all of the crochet cotton she need already, as many of her friends would give her balls that they no longer wanted, and bookmarks take so little material. My grandma is so fast at crocheting that she said she just did a few each evening and was done with the entire 200 in no time.

This was another really inexpensive wedding favor that can be easily customized to fit the style of your wedding. Crochet pattern central has a lot of bookmark patterns for free, and many other site to as well. The materials to make the bookmarks can be purchased very inexpensively, especially if you watch for the frequent sales and coupons that crafting and hobby store usually offer. Picking patterns and colors that go along with the rest of your wedding can make this wedding favor uniquely yours and give guests something both beautiful and useful to remember your wedding by.

Handcrafted Wedding Favors: Happy Tears Handkerchiefs

In searching for ideas to incorporate into our wedding, I found so many wedding favors that I loved that we actually had quite a few different wedding favors given out at our wedding. But we hardly spent any money on them because we chose to make most of them ourselves (with lots of help from our wonderful family). One of my favorites is this handkerchief for happy tears.

To go with our wedding colors, we choose to make two different sets of handkerchiefs one in lavender (for women) and one in silver gray (for men). We didn't think the guys would really like the lavender ones that much, but you could just choose one more neutral color to simplify things as well.

I had bought a lot of white fabric really inexpensively to use for making table cloths and decorating for the wedding, so I just used a little of this to sew the handkerchiefs. Since I wanted to make 200 of these, I made this a pretty quick sewing project. I cut 9 inch squares out of white muslin. Then I folded the edge over about 1/4 inch over as I was sewing and zigzagged around all sides in contracting thread. When I zigzagged, I sewed very close to the edge allowing the needle to go over the edge every other zigzag. I thought this was a quick way to finish the edges nicely with a decorative touch.

If you had more time, folding the edges over twice would probably look slightly nicer and last a little longer. But even though the edges had a few loose threads that came off the first few washes, we are still using the extra handkerchiefs on a daily basis more than 4 years after our wedding. There were quite a few left over, so as an added bonus, we now have a lot of cloth hankies to use instead of Kleenex, and they are holding up great.

If you could find a great deal on small handkerchiefs you could eliminate the sewing step entirely if you wished. Or you could find someone else who like to sew and wanted to do this a wedding gift or for a reasonable price.

For the next step, we enlisted the help of two of our grandmothers. My husband had created a special letter, kind of like a combined monogram that was an A (for Anna) and a N (for Nate) together. You could of course just use a regular monogram or other small symbol as well. This special letter was used in many things for our wedding, and we asked our grandmothers to embroider it in the corner of each handkerchief. I gave each one completed handkerchief, and the pattern to fit in the corner and trace on each handkerchief. I think our grandmothers were actually quite happy to help and be apart of our wedding in this way.

Lastly, we folded each handkerchief so all points pointed in, with the embroidered corner on top. We made our own wedding programs that had pockets in the front and back for favors, so on the front pocket we had printed the message "For happy tears." Alternately, you could print this message on a small piece of card stock and tie it onto the handkerchief with a ribbon.

A Handcrafted Wedding Series

I liked making things myself long before I was a mom. As we prepared to be married, my husband-to-be and I wanted our wedding to be extremely special, but not extremely expensive. We wanted our wedding to be be about all God has done for us and how He brought us together as part of the plan for our lives. We wanted to make it clear that we were fully committed to this covenant and plan on keeping our vows for life. We wanted our wedding to be remembered for these things, not that we had spent a lot of money for a huge party one day.

So, we set about figuring out how to make our wedding fantastically frugal. We were able to incorporate so many personal touches by doing much of the work ourselves, with a lot of help from friends and family. Remembering our wedding day is such a joy because we were able to have a ceremony and reception so perfect for us, without spending a ton of money.

As I have time, I am going to be writing A Handcrafted Wedding Series. It is my hope that others might be inspired to created their own uniquely fantastic and frugal wedding. I will try to keep this page updated with all the wedding related posts.

Wedding Favors

• A Handkerchief For Happy Tears
• Delicate Crocheted Bookmarks