Decorate staircases, banisters and other stuff

From time to time, you might be lucky enough to find features in a room that are perfect for decoration. I’m talking about staircases, banisters, posts, maybe even windows. You should totally take advantage of these features. They’re usually very easy to dress up and it’ll add something extra to your wedding reception or ceremony.

Photo by Doris at a wedding in RPV

This small set of stairs is a perfect example. The railing is maybe a yard long, but doesn’t it look pretty? All it needed was a short length of tulle (although the fabric above looks like chiffon), maybe three yards, and maybe nine bright roses to bunch at each end. You don’t even need a big bow or anything.

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Draping a church with fabric

Whenever I see a wedding in the movies or on TV (I’m looking at you, Khloe and Kim Kardashian), they always look like such elaborate affairs. For us folks who live in reality, we know that walking down the aisle probably won’t include angels hanging from the ceiling (Madea’s Family Reunion) or fireworks going off as you say “I do” (Bridesmaids). But there’s gotta be a way to dress up a church to make it prettier for a wedding right? Well, one answer would be flowers, and another would be draping. I like to use a combination of both.

Now, please let me be clear about this — most churches won’t let you do all this to their sanctuary. This happened to be the church I grew up in, so my mom had a lot of pull, plus we knew all the rules — no tape on the pews. The front of the church is easy to drape because there are a lot of points where I can hook the fabric, like microphones and corners. But, this does take time — whenever I had to drape this church, I always did it the night before and it almost always took at least two hours.

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Decorating a 25th anniversary wedding

Getting to five years married is tough enough these days, so making it to 25 years? That’s definitely a milestone that should be celebrated.

This wedding took place in 2004 at Burbank’s Pickwick Gardens. The bride was a friend of my mom’s, so my mom of course pulled out all the stops to decorate this wedding. Quite honestly, I’ve been wanting to post the above picture for years, but didn’t sit down to properly edit it until just recently (the wedding took place in July and it was extremely bright that day). But I was thoroughly impressed with how the ceremony decorations came out here — large arrangements with lavender roses, orchids and pink ginger and lots of ti leaves spray painted silver, on top of silver lamé-draped columns.

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Using sequined fabric to decorate a wedding

I have used a variety of beautiful fabrics to decorate weddings, but sequined fabric is by far the flashiest.

As I’ve posted recently, I have several colors of sequined fabric available for sale, so I thought it would be nice to show you how it can be used to decorate weddings. Above is the most simple way to use sequined fabric — use it as a sort of flashy tablecloth top. This color is what I would call green apple green.

And while this may be the most simple way to use sequined fabric, its gaining in popularity. I’ve been seeing more and more table settings with colored and textured tablecloths, rather than just simple white.

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Elaborate Backdrops

Most of the backdrops I’ve ever decorated have used columns, balustrades and colonnades. However, most backdrops, I’ve found, have been on straight PVC frames like the one below.

There are several benefits to decorating a straight frame, rather than a combination of columns or colonnades.

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Wedding in a church gym

Katie and Dustin, a couple whose wedding was photographed by my friend Lori, are a couple of smart cookies. They’re budget conscious — and who isn’t these days? — so both their families pitched in to help make their wedding a spectacular event.

By Lori Anderson Photography

Has your church gym/rec room ever looked like this? Yeah, me neither. Let’s take a closer look at all the details.

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How to decorate a simple head table and backdrop

Very quietly, I added a Contact form to this site, and a few people have been using it to ask how to do certain things they’ve seen pictures of on this blog. Here’s one of those questions.

Hi Darleene, I found the attached photo on your blog and had questions regarding they type and width of the fabric used for the head table.. I just love this look and would like to attempt to recreate it for my wedding in September. Any advice you have is greatly appreciated.

Brenda McNemar

The photo she’s talking about is this one:

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