Wedding Welcome Sign – Save Hundreds!

Hello fellow DIYers…

Who am I kidding?

I do not DIY anything. I am the worst. I am creative – when it comes to processes to follow. Not so much when it comes to painting and art. I’ve been trying to write a book practically my entire life, but writers block prevents that.

But weddings are EXPENSIVE!

I really want a beautiful dream wedding… can I do it for a couple hundred dollars? The answer is no. Venues alone run you thousands of dollars (in my area). So I have to find ways to save. And some of the design aspects I found I could DIY for drastically less (🥲).

Here we are. My first major DIY for the wedding! And I’ll walk you through how I saved hundreds so that maybe you can too! (Also some mistakes I made/things I would do differently so maybe you can avoid those yourself).

Wedding Welcome Sign

First – I have a free app on my iPhone (works on Androids too) called Da Vinci Eye. This app uses your phone as a looking glass of sorts – where you can put the image you want over top of the paper you are working on and pretty much trace that image.

I designed the image I wanted in another app called Enlight (basically photoshop editing type app – I do not know if this app is free still, but any editing app that lets you overlay images on top of each other will work). I used images off google searches that I liked, overlaying letters and words and images to design this mock-up:

I bought this large 5.5ft sign at a local thrift store for $50. (Sometimes thrift stores have bargain days, so I probably could have waited and gotten it even cheaper!)

After that, I used the Da Vinci Eye app to project my image on my TV so that I could see where I was drawing / writing at… and I painted away! (The great thing about acrylic paint is it dries quick and if you hate it – you can paint right over it to fix any mistakes!)

I did end up free handing the greenery, and I watched Pamela Groppe’s YouTube video on “how to paint leaves (beginner friendly)”

Things I would have done differently:

I definitely would have used painters tape to line out straight lines with the highest and lowest points I wanted the letters to be. Whether I moved the tripod or if it was just me… some of my letters became a bit slanted or not as big as I would have liked.

While this isn’t what a professionals work would have come out to look like – I paid less than $75 and a few hours and likely saved $400-$500 (as I am sure a custom 5.5ft sign like this isn’t cheap)

Subscribe for future crafting updates! I’ve got a few more up my sleeve (and luckily some friends who love me)

Exploring Norway

Oslo, Norway

I flew Norwegian Airlines. (Either I do not know what a good quality airline is or I got a really good deal. Sure the coffee/tea costs extra, and there were no complimentary  peanuts, but I’m going to Europe; who needs those things? )

While I waited to board the plane, I asked random people nosey questions like where are you going and why. I scored a temporary traveling companion; her name is Helga. She lived in Oslo for twenty years, and she offered to help me navigate the train to my hostel. Helga is going to Spain to meet up with an old friend she dated back in 1977. So far, she topped my charts for coolest person I’ve met. She was one of the first female boxers, and was deemed “the blond Viking” whilst fighting in Las Vegas. Seriously badass.

If I die, let my tombstone read “No adventure too big or small; knew no stranger.”

Somehow I had lucked out in the random draw to have a window seat behind the wing of the aircraft. The clouds laid out across the atmosphere like miles of untouched snow. Which looked cool, until the descent it actually became miles of untouched snow. Brrr! The coolest site was when the clouds broke apart to reveal a huge island. It kind of looked uninhabited. You think you grasp the vastness of the ocean, but it doesn’t really settle in until you are flying over it.

Once I landed, I started to lose my vision; a migraine. Helga helped me navigate to my train stop, and her friend gave me directions on how to get to my hotel. I am horrible with directions. For awhile, with a migraine, I was walking up and down the same street lost. I asked one stranger where my street was, and I think she purposely told me the wrong way. Thank God I went with my gut feeling and didn’t follow through on her directions. I stared at a map by the train station for about twenty minutes, trying to guide through the unfamiliar street names. I remembered that I had grabbed a map in the train station, and I pulled that out. It wasn’t long after that, that I was struggling to open the door to my hostel. The headache was bad. Lucky for me, the room was available and she let me check in early. I slept for probably six hours. I lost my day in Norway.

I did some brief exploring while the sun was still up. Ate a fast food burger because the train ticket had wiped out my budget for the day. The exchange rate was not in my favor, and I was in the second richest country in the world. (Known for being expensive)

I’ve decided when I come back in a week, I will have taken the time to really study the map and decide what I’ll be doing, minus a headache. It will be a much more productive day.

❤

Bucket List: Get lost in a foreign country