Wedding Wednesday: DIY Fabric Streamer Ceremony Backdrop

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Today's Wedding Wednesday is taking on that fabulous fabric streamer backdrop we DIYed for our wedding ceremony. That sucker was at least 20 feet long and a good 15 feet tall at it's highest point. And it really was a spectacular background for our vows. I decided to use sheets to save myself a TON of money. Doing a streamer backdrop with ribbons would have cost me hundreds of dollars but doing it with sheets ended up costing me about $10 for the entire project. SCORE! Here's how we did it.

Images Courtesy of: Miranda Laine Photography

DIY Fabric Streamer Ceremony Backdrop Tutorial

Supplies:

Images Courtesy of: Miranda Laine Photography

Directions:

Step One: Follow the directions on each dye packet and dye sheets (I did 2 sheets per packet). Be sure to do ALL the prepwork (and not just toss them in the washer with the dye). That includes wetting the sheets and mixing the dye in hot water with salt. Dry.

Step Two: Use good fabric scissors (or a rotary cutter) to cut sheets into 1"-2" strips (or, if you're me, have Katie do the bulk of them for you!). I didn't care if this was done perfectly so Katie and I just eyeballed it. But if perfect strips are important to you then make a template strip out of cardstock and use it as a guide.

Step Three: Collect all your strips together and sew them. My mom did this the week of the wedding and (because ours was SO big) it took her about 3 hours. She used one strip of fabric as a foundation and would sew different strips of the fabrics along it (side by side) in an assorted fashion. When she ran out of her foundation fabric strip, she would stop a few inches before it ended and sew another foundation strip on. Then she'd keep sewing the different strips of the fabrics along it until we had a massive 20 foot stretch of fabric streamers. We had a bag full of leftover strips (which came in handy later).

Step Four: The day before the wedding, my Maid-of-Honor Amanda and one of my brothers helped me get the fabric streamer backdrop up on the tree where we were doing the ceremony. They used a staple gun to staple the foundation fabric strip along the length of the tree limb. This involved lots of climbing along tree branches so I advise y'all to wear pants and shoes.

Step Five: This is the part were you fill in the gaps. Use the staple gun to adhere strips in whereever there are gaps. Then, use the extra fabric strips to fill out the length of the streamers (because mine needed to be so tall – it was too short in many areas and we needed more fabric strips to lengthen it) by tieing the extra fabric strips on to the short parts. This is boring, by the way. Use scissors to trim along the bottom of the backdrop.

Step Six: Um. This is the step that all my wedding planner friends told me to do and I didn't. AND WE SHOULD HAVE. Moral of the story? LISTEN TO YOUR WEDDING PLANNER. They know. What everyone told us to do was to hot gun small weights (pennies, nuts, fishing weights) to the bottom of each streamer.

That stops it from doing this:

Images Courtesy of: Miranda Laine Photography