Inspiring DIY Eco-friendly Decor, Favours & Ideas We Spotted At This Green Wedding!

We love a proactive bride more than anything, and when a bride takes efforts to make sure her wedding is green and sustainable, then even more so! Real Bride Sanchita had a super Pinterest-worthy green wedding, and it was her sister who ideated and came up with everything, which we must say, we were very impressed by! Beginnings For You★ 4.8  captured everything beautifully, including the uber creative ideas!

All these details and DIYs mentioned her were the brain child of the bride's sister Prakriti who herself is a passionate believer of pro-sustainability and they tried and contributed on doing their bit in our everyday lives to be zero waste and environment friendly. Fed up of not being able to find cost effective solutions for planning an eco-friendly wedding she thought of some awesome solutions to this problem of the our generation. Here are elements from #butterchcikenwithbhujia wedding on theme “Let Love Grow” which we absolutely loved! Over to the bride and her sister as they tell us all about it!

So here are all the cool ideas they implemented which we absolutely loved!

Favour ideas

We had a Mehendi favour cart, which had the following things:

• The Cart had a signage saying - 'Let Love Grow'. The signage signified the mehendi favours and was made on seed paper and to make it stiff enough we used unused cardboard. Cardboard was recycled and seed paper was planted in our garden at home.There were seed balls kept for the outstation guests. The idea of having seed balls was because it was easily portable and each seedball could grow into a full marigold plant. We packed each seedball in small cloth bags that we upcycled out of an unused organza dupatta. These were ordered from @araatrika for INR 20 each.

• We kept saplings for the local guests at the Mehendi. The idea of having a plant as a mehendi favour was not new but super exciting for me personally because gifting a plant is the best gift you can give to anyone. Most of us are so occupied with our professional and personal lives that gardening is a long lost hobby. The plants were bought from a local nursery at INR 30 each. The special thing about all 150 saplings was the packaging. When you generally go to buy sapling from a nursery they are in plastic bag or plastic pots and we know how harmful is that. So when we ordered plants at the nursery we requested him to not to acquire them in plastic and instead wrap them in jute bags. We collected scrap jute bags from scrap dealer and cut them into smaller pieces suitable for one sapling.

• We made sure we went for sustainable options for getting garment gifts for our guests. So we sourced all such gifts locally made by Bikaner people and they get a fair price without any middlemen involved. The leheriya sarees in the favours cart were given away to the bridesmaids. These lehreiya sarees were then worn by the bridesmaids on the Haldi ceremony and each one of them styled it so differently and looked absolutely gorgeous. We just wrapped each saree with a golden thread because these were so colorfully beautiful that we didn’t want to wrap them.

Other favour ideas: 

• Haldi Favours: As mentioned earlier we made sure we go local with the wedding return gifts. There were khadi kurtas for our male guests and ghotapatti kurta cloth for our female guests. 

• We also decided to give handmade hathphool for ladies and a small pomp pomp badge for men on the Haldi. The hathphool was made from unused bangles at home. We made around 150 for females and 30 for males so we had to put a limited stock sign for the male guests. 

• Bridesmaids Favours: We wanted to gift something unique to our friends and we went with a reusable box of organic beauty products specially curated by "Lushveda" without any plastic packaging and a cultural local art chowki.

• Sagan Gift Packaging: Every wedding involves lots and lots of gift exchanges and specially on the Sagan day. The gifts for the groom's family were all packed in a cotton cloth bag reusable cloth and was upcycled using some wooden trays and baskets that were just not used. These were further decorated with net instead of plastic. There was a handwritten name tag attached to every gift to complete this gift look.

Decor Ideas

• The Bride's Seating: This was made by threading together pastel colour artificial flowers with a peach draped canopy for the Mehendi.

• Florals used: We reused whatever was available with our partner vendor. Using fresh flowers isn’t that eco friendly because plants are destroyed to fulfil this demand of fresh flowers for weddings. Also, the kind of flowers we wanted weren’t locally grown. We were really happy to go ahead with available options of artificial flowers and gave it our creative mind to make it as beautiful as we could.

• Signage Boards: These were purely handmade for the Mehendi & Sangeet. They were made using seed paper and cardboard scrap. The Green wedding signage was made for the guests to educate them a little bit about how this was an eco-friendly event and how they could help us achieve that through their actions. It was really important to have a hashtag signage so that when the guests post pictures, they should used the hashtag so that we all can look back and relive those memories again and again.

• Welcome Mirror signage: I made a tree signifying the green aspect and wrote the couples’s name as a welcome sign.

• Chair Tags for Sangeet: I made special seating tags for the couple for the sangeet ceremony. The tags were upcycled using scrap jutebag and acrylic paint and had the hashtag significance for the Mr. and Mrs.

• Ring Platter: We had to create a unique and special ring platter for the engagement. Usually ring platters are created using lots of thermacol and plastic and they are beautiful. Keeping in mind the minute details for this green wedding, I chose to create a terrarium to keep rings using a beautiful succulent. I hand lettered “Let Love Grow” on the platter using markers.
• The Hashtag: These days what’s a wedding without the hashtag as a part of your decor because it’s fun to goof around it for pictures and the guests cannot help use the tag on their social media. We had to brainstorm a lot as to how we can get this made in a cost effective environment friendly way. We chose old thick scrap cardboard and got it cut at a local shop that have expertise on cutting letters for local business and brands and we were so happy with the outcome. We touched up the surface with white paint and it perfectly matched the stage for the Sangeet ceremony just under a tree. This costed us Rs. 9,000 as compared to Rs. 40,000 for a wooden one, which was a steal!

• Haldi Decor: We had to do something unique for our Haldi decoration because it took place at bride’s home and there were a zillion memories attached to this place and people that surrounded her. Every Haldi is super incomplete without Genda phool (marigold) and I did not forget that. We decided to grow our own gendas at home and used the pots in the decoration. The pots were coupled with Nimbu Mirchi (Lemon Chilli) strings to give it a unique Haldi vibe. These lemons and Chillies were distributed among help because it was unused and a funny thing but we are still enjoying the nimbu ka achaar at home :p. I fall in love with this no waste idea everyday.

Other eco-friendly ideas

• Sagan Envelopes: Has anyone ever thought what happens to these after receiving them? We open them and take out the money and throw it away. Brand new envelope thrown away in a minute. We cannot reuse most of them because they are printed with the host’s names. So we up cycled the envelopes from newspaper and put a wax seal on each of those. We made approximate 200 envelopes and had three colors to indicate which one has how much money. We were very surprised to hear later that the guests kept these as a memory from the wedding!

• The Wedding Card: We went ahead with E-invites but had to get some cards printed for some guests and we were sure we wanted those also eco-friendly. We bought seed paper & cotton paper from a B2B manufacture (Pap Art Creation/ Palanto) who couldn’t fulfil our order at first due to low volume, but helped us when she heard what I had planned for the wedding. We got the cards printed locally and designed it in a minimalistic manner. The cards were printed locally and costed us INR 58 per card. The envelope was made from mixed flowers seed paper and insides were made from recycled cotton fibres.

• Welcome Kits: Every guest loves a welcome kit and we wanted the guests to feel special as well. Most bags have plastic and so we decided to use brown paper bag and write on it a small welcome note by hand. The welcome kits had some savoury snacks, some biscuits, a drink, energy bar, a small cute bag with a mint, a sewing kit, some Vicks and a Digene medicine. There were 70 such kits made and hand lettered by me individually. 

• Haldi Footwear for the bride: I used up an old pair of kohlapuris and took out the bag of scrap fabrics and laces to create a brand new bright pair for the bride to go with Haldi theme.

• Return Gifts Packing: Any wedding involves tones of shopping and since we had a long time go plan this big day we were conscious from the start. It wasn’t very difficult to say no to plastic to shopkeepers while buying any stuff. We sourced all gifts in our own cloth bags and then all return gifts were packed in up-cycled cloth bags stitched by our mom and further designed by me. The name tags and a sweet thank you message for all the gifts was hand lettered on seed paper. The cloth bags were like a potli which could be used in future to carry anything from accessories to shoes in your luggage back or storage in a cupboard. The bag costed us INR 30 each to make at home.

• Getting Ready Robes: I used our existing robes from home and used some paints to write Bride and sister of the Bride for both of us.
• Cutlery: The food was served in barges/bamboo disposable plated instead of thermocol or plastic and ceramic re-usable cutlery. There were paper straws and water campers instead of plastic bottles.

 

From the Bride and her sister:

The idea behind green wedding was not just to reduce wastage that a wedding generates but was also to spread some awareness of how small choices and small conscience efforts can make a big difference. My sister and I believe that even if 100 guests from our wedding learned about the importance of being eco-friendly and a few choices they can make in their daily lives it can make a big difference overall. Weddings are a celebration and our celebrations should be all about celebrating love for two souls with love for nature. One thing that helped me to plan this entire wedding was my constant research on how things should be done. Wedmegood's posts and articles about what things we should keep in mind help me plan the dream wedding for my sister with perfection. I personally love WedMeGood for the content it curates and for me its an inspiration. 

 

You can follow Prakriti's green journey and find more ideas on her Instagram page @creativemindscorner.

 

ALSO READ: An Eco-Friendly Bikaner Wedding With Striking Outfits, Heirloom Jewellery & Lots Of DIYs!