DIY wedding materials we made

After a 2-year pandemic engagement and an 8 year relationship, my wife Rocel and I finally got married early in June. As a graphic artist who is frugal, or “tihik” in Bisaya, and with Rocel’s own experience in design and event organizing, we tried our best to DIY as much as we could possible.

This included:

• Monogram logo design
• Invitations
• Envelopes
• Menu cards
• Facebook group posts and group covers
• Giveaways
• Church missalette or misalet
• Bible cover
• Video slideshow of photos of us growing up
• Transportation & tour planning, among others

Below I’ll share a bit on how we went about making some of this happen, which helped make our wedding affordable, yet unique and special for us and our friends and family.

Monogram logo design

If you don’t have an art background, there are actually free online monogram websites that can make one for you. Here’s one at Minted.com, and another at DesignMantic. You can also get logos done by artists at Fiver.com at rates that might fit your budget.

As an artist myself, I already had some ideas in mind for our monogram and began drafting ideas for a few days on Adobe Illustrator. If you don’t have Illustrator, you can also use free monogram templates on Canva. I experimented with different cursive and stylized fonts, along with a leaf motif we wanted to use. We wanted certain plants and trees native to the Philippines featured in our design, especially plants Rocel and I were familiar with. These leaves were also featured in the rest of our materials, especially our invitations.

Invitations

For our invitations, we used a 5×7 invite that had three pages: invitation, entourage, and RSVP.

Since our agreed theme would be tropical Filipiniana, we used a leaf motif highlighting species native to the Philippines. There’s an Antipolo leaf in there too, since the city that shares the tree’s namesake is a favorite destination of ours. If you’re a patron I share more about the design in one of my latest Patreon posts here.

Like our monogram, we finalized the design and content in Illustrator. If you don’t have Illustrator, you can use free wedding invitation templates on Canva. Since we wanted the invitations on nicer paper, we sent the artwork to a local printer. We printed 30 invitations on a nice textured cardstock for about P1,000 pesos or $20 USD.

Envelopes for invitations

For our envelopes, we searched on Shopee for dark green envelopes that could hold 5×7 invitations. When we found one, we ordered a few to see if our printed invitations could fit. We also wanted to use them to prototype our own DIY envelope lining.

Once our first small order of envelopes arrived, we measured the inside flap and envelope pocket and began drafting designs for the envelope’s inside lining. We decided that the lining would be simple, highlighting our new monogram as well as the same leaf motif to keep with our theme.

After applying the measurements in artwork on Adobe Illustrator, we started making the physical prototypes by printing, cutting, and gluing them inside the envelopes. Here’s one way you can make your own DIY envelope linings. If you don’t have Illustrator, you can easily make these for free on Canva as well. After a few adjustments, we were done.

Menu card

When we had the main designs done such as the monogram and invitations, we went ahead and applied our leaf motif and font styles to this simple menu card. This was also done in Illustrator, but you can use menu templates on Canva too. These were also printed and cut at home. We then went online again to look for simple card stands and used those to prop up the menu cards.

Facebook group posts and group cover

For our guests abroad and those who could not make it because of travel restrictions, we created a private Facebook group to share a livestream of our wedding. We also decided to create special Facebook posts using our leaf motif design and monogram to keep with our theme.

I transferred our template to Canva so Rocel and I could make our own posts using the same template. Rocel created “countdown” cards to remind people of the big day, while I created other posts featuring our pre-nup photos emblazoned with a watermark version of our monogram. Our Facebook group cover would also show one of our favorite pre-nup photos, together with our hashtag and monogram.

Giveaways

Our giveaways were a hybrid of DIY and purchased or outsourced materials. For our Ninongs and Ninangs or principal sponsors, Rocel came up with the idea of using native tampipi or woven gift bags or boxes filled with simple gifts for our elders.

Tampipi are typically simple bags, boxes, or containers made out of local native plants, specifically their leaves. These are easily found in merkados, palengkes, or markets in most places in the Philippines.

The boxes we found were made of leaves from the pandan tree. I also just learned that Hawaiians and other communities in the Pacific use pandan for various materials. Hawaiians call pandan leaves lauhala (lau for leaf, hala for the pandan tree). We also got some boxes made out of buri, from the buri palm. These leaves are much softer, and used for banigs or woven mats and pay-pays or hand-held fans.

To decorate the tampipi gifts, Rocel got dark green ribbons to go with our leaf motif. We found dried flowers from a market in Dapitan, and made our own “thank you tags”, printed and cut at home.

Inside the tampipi gifts we placed beautiful coasters made out of capiz or kapis, a small bottle of liquor, and Inabel woven towels from Ilocos. We were able to send our monogram design with our desired text to the Inabel supplier to make simple wraps around the towels. It wasn’t until later that I learned about some of the issues behind the exploitation of capiz from the species Placuna placenta or window-pane oyster. Will have to look into that for future reference.

For all our other guests, we found smaller Inabel towels of high quality. This vendor also agreed to wrap them in our own design. This was provided by a working mom at Antonio’s Soapery, named after her son Kaido Antonio.

We also had a smaller celebration in Pangasinan for Rocel’s extended family. For them we also had DIY giveaways, which were simple jars filled with Boholano pasalubong: peanut kisses and polvoron.

The polvoron was actually home-made, made by my aunt in Bohol. We then got green craft paper from an office supplies store, twine from the merkado or palengke, and then printed out stickers which we also cut out ourselves. This was all we needed to complete this last set of giveaways.

Missalette, or misalet

Catholic church weddings typically have a missalette (spelled misalet in Filipino). These are given to the congregation to follow along during the wedding mass. We were lucky to have an “heirloom misalet”, an older misalet used by our family in Bohol. From these texts and designs, we had a foundation to build upon, updating them to match our theme and to include passages and music for our own wedding.

Bible cover

Since we had already been designing all these materials, we decided to also make a cover for the bible to be blessed and used at the wedding. We applied our font and leaf motif to the cover too.

Photo slideshow

For our video slideshow, we used Canva as well. I had no idea it had video editing capabilities aside from graphics and print design. It’s quite user-friendly, so all we had to do was choose the photos we wanted, upload them to Canva, and then stitch them together complete with transitions and simple effects.

Transportation and tour schedule

Rocel and I also planned out the transportation and tour portion of the wedding festivities. Since Rocel’s family would be visiting from Pangasinan and elsewhere, we wanted to ensure they had transportation the entire week they’d be there. We provided shuttle service to and from the church and reception, as well as a tour of the beautiful Chocolate Hills and other popular tourist destinations on the island. Thanks to Josie Florendo-Gamutan who helped us do the final reservations of the vehicles needed, and even led our Bohol tour.

Other aspects

Rocel collaborated with a designer to make her wedding dress, as well as another boutique based in Pasig for the bridesmaid dresses.

Our Auntie Ichu let us borrow materials for the church, such as a veil that my mom actually wore at her wedding in 1980, and coins my aunt’s own children used at their weddings. Wedding coins are also called arras or arrhae and must number up to 13; part of an old Catholic tradition with roots in Spain. 2 of the coins we used were actually from the American colonial period in the Philippines.

On one side of the American colonial coins it says Pilipinas, and on the other side, United States of America. These were brought to the US by my Papa who traveled from the Philippines to America sometime in 1929, when the Philippines was still a US colony.

Just married, and just right

One of the challenges during the planning and “designing” of our wedding was managing expectations. We wanted to make sure things went right, without getting too attached to making the wedding perfect. This can be made more difficult when it’s the couple themselves doing much of the planning and spending for the wedding.

To overcome this, we made sure to check in with each other regarding how we felt about the wedding so far. We also tried our best to live in the moment, and celebrate milestones leading up to the wedding. We enjoyed the simple moments, from the delivery of our toy portraits for our wedding cake, to the moment when Rocel’s family finally met mine a few days before the wedding.

Rocel also introduced me to simple meditation and breathing exercises which helped a lot. I found myself doing them often, especially in the week leading up to the wedding, let alone the day of. It simply involves focusing on the current moment, appreciating what is immediately in front of you, including each breath and the fact that you’re alive, and nothing else. Just you in the world. Then you take a deep breath in, and a deep breath out, and repeat for a minute or two, or until you feel calmer. I got so good at it that I did it while running errands, or between stressful situations.

Special thanks

Though we worked hard on our wedding, there have been people along the way who helped us make it safe, fun, and special for us and everyone who joined us that day.

Our families and entourage helped us so much, whether financial or otherwise, and offered emotional and spiritual help in the months and days leading up to the wedding.

Our vendors, who were essentially our partners in making the day happen, were crucial for all the other details and areas beyond our expertise and knowledge (which was basically everything else besides planning and designing before the wedding).

They include the following:

• On-the-day Coordinator: Silverbleu Weddings & Things
• Church & staff: Baclayon Church
• Venue & stay: Bohol Bee Farm Resort
• Ube & carrot cake: Estrella Bakery, Bohol
• Cake topper: Happy Garaje’s Studio.curio
• Bridal gown: Bryan Peralta Designs
• Entourage gowns: Wedding Artefacts
• Groomsmen barongs: Mevilla Boutique Tagbilaran (listed on FB as Mrs. Mannequin)
• Photography: Vhince Chiu Photo
• Video: Supersevenstudio
• Sign language interpretation: Leslie Marie Dispo
• Lights, sounds, livestream: DRC music center
• Make up: Makeup by Marian
• Flowers & styling: Romeo Varquez
• Inabel short-sewn towels: Antonio’s Soapery
• Emcee & hashtag: Maryanne Apale
• Choir & music: Fifth Symphony
• Transportation & tours: Josie Florendo-Gamutan

Finally, which isn’t like me on my blog to do, I want to thank God. Whom despite my shaky faith and constant questioning of Their religious administrators here on planet Earth, be they Catholic, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Confucian, Buddhist… my faith in some sort of grander power unknown to us still helps drives me forward.

That said, if you’re an artist like me, with a spouse who shares your love to make something unique, special (and affordable) out of your wedding, plan early, work with what you have, have faith in yourselves, and enjoy every single minute of it.