Yesterday I featured some of our favorite DIY details from our wedding. Today, I’m focusing on our “quasi-DIY” details – projects that we assembled but didn’t make or used vintage items, but that we still count as DIY since we procured all the pieces. Just after we decided to have a vintage- and internationally-inspired wedding, I came across vintage-reproduction globes from Anthropologie that we knew would be great as reception centerpieces.

We immediately ordered about a dozen of these globes, and then spent a few months trying to figure out how to arrange them. During a trip to Ethiopia in January, I picked up one of these baskets, known as boat baskets or Gambella baskets, as a souvenir. Once I returned home, I realized that these baskets were a perfect fit for our globe centerpieces. Some friends of ours still living in Ethiopia were kind enough to send us a few extra baskets, but you can also find these baskets via ebay and other online retailers.

Even with our globe centerpieces, I still wanted a few floral centerpieces with a few of my favorite spring flowers: peonies, anemones, and lilacs. I fell in love with the idea of loose, informal arrangements in mason jars and vintage milk glass vases.

I found all the vases, both mason jars and milk glass vases, on ebay. We asked our florist to put together arrangements of cream roses in the milk glass vases and arrangements of peonies, anemones and lilacs in the mason jars.

Our vintage cake stands were some of our favorite details from our wedding. We knew that we wanted to work with our favorite local bakery, CakeLove, for our wedding cake, and we decided to order three separate 9” cakes instead of a traditional tiered wedding cake. After discovering that cake stand rentals are surprisingly expensive, we decided to find an alternative solution.

I’ve always loved the look of vintage milk glass and Depression glass, both of which are widely available via ebay. I purchased three vintage cake stands: one hobnail milk glass stand, one silver-crested Fenton milk glass stand, and a clear blue stand with a moon and stars pattern.

For our favors, we knew that we wanted them to be something edible. I thought of baking cookies to give away as favors, but as we got closer to the wedding that idea seemed to be too daunting of a task, so we decided to use chocolate truffles from Whole Foods instead. We chose two Middle Eastern-inspired truffle flavors, one with rosewater and white chocolate and another with dark chocolate, orange, and cardamom.

We used two different kinds of favor boxes – a blue and brown floral-patterned box pre-cut in the shape of a flower from I Need a Favor by Kate, and cardboard favor boxes with blue paper lace from Etsy seller brookerpie. We also used baker’s twine to tie on gift tags stamped with the word “Merci” and placed the favors at each place setting before the reception. Although this was one of our smaller details, we loved the way we were able to tie so many elements of our wedding together with our favors.

I’ve still got a few more details to share with you, so I’ll see you all again tomorrow with the final installment on my DIY wedding!

{all photos by Punam Bean}