diy Venue Decor

Not for my wedding but my massive birthday party (over 150 guests) I decorated my marquee and garden (had a Glastonbury theme). It looked brilliant but it was very very hard a stressful and took way longer than I thought with 6 of us doing it. I learnt my lesson and have hired an on the day stylist and a florist who sets up/packs diwn, for our wedding as my theme is once again quite out there (mexican fiesta, I am an ideas person haha). Cost about £350 but worth every penny already!


What are you going to be decorating?

View quoted message Omg a Mexican fiesta wedding sounds incredible!! I hope it’s the vision you’re after😍

Honestly it’s not going to be a lot, greenery and candles mostly, I feel like it’s hard to do it wrong??! So I’m hoping my family and friends can follow my lead with some practise runs before the wedding😬 the venue itself is beautiful so I don’t want to mask it too much!

Obviously if it’s going to take me hours it’s not feasible so I’m hoping I can get some advice from likeminded people on here🤞🏼🤞🏼

View quoted message That should be relatively easy then. I saw this really simple, beautiful wedding at venue near me. So simple but effective and wouldn't take ages.

We are doing this in a few weeks time (at present I feel quite calm about it!). To help us we have: 1. Done a mock up of some key bits and taken pictures for reference - this helped us get a sense of timings and ensured we were happy with our plans. 2. We have packed boxes of decor items up by room/area with a list printed on the side so it's easy to hand over a box with a picture to a willing helper from the bridal party to help speed things up and make sure things go smoothly. 3. We have artificial flowers mainly so things are very low stress, I just plan to snip in some fresh gypsophila into the jars the night before then pop things out. 4. I have discussed with venue staff our plans and timings of the morning to avoid any surprises/delays getting into the space and agreed a small group of willing and capable helpers. Best of luck! x

View quoted message Thank you, I think this might be exactly what I needed to read!🙌🏼 I loooove the organisation, I’ll definitely be copying those tips!


Where did you decide to get your artificial flowers/greenery from? I’ve bought the odd bit here and there online but not loving any to buy lots yet! X

We’ll be decorating our venue in two weeks, we have the venue the day before for setup but I’m not expecting it to take too long with a few friends/family members helping! Ours is ceremony/reception in the same place too. I bought lots of decor items from Whittingtons (they have candles, candle holders, artificial flowers, lanterns etc.) and dried flowers from Barn Florist. Most of ours has been prepped and packed in advance so we’ll just need to unpack everything on the Friday ☺️ and then finish anything that couldn’t be done beforehand, like adding in the fresh flowers.

We went round all the usual shops (hobbycraft, dunelm, The Range) I would take photos of items we liked and then get a sense of how they translated on camera. That helped us source the bits that were most realistic and developed a colour palette - I find artificial lavender stems from most stores worked really well, and I have also used real dried wheat sheaves to thread into displays. Whittingtons always gets good reviews. Hope you enjoy!