Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Those Wedding Leftovers! Part I

Happy 12/12/12! Now that you know a little bit about Thanksmas, I'd like to show off some of the new things we tried out this year including place settings and some fun DIY (and recycled!) holiday decorations.

After having my roommates wedding last year and our wedding this year we had quite a bit of stuff leftover.  Things like extra centerpiece vases, small votive candles, votive holders..stuff like that.  There's really only two things you can do when you have wedding leftovers - give them away or reuse them.  Being the thrifty people that we are we, of course, chose to reuse them.

One of the things we knew we wanted to use was our leftover centerpiece vases since we each had a few of them.  And because they are vases they are a pretty easy thing to reuse as, well, just plain old vases.  But where's the fun in that? So in the holiday spirit we made them into these fantastic holiday decorations and centerpieces for our Thanksmas dinner.


The best part about these is that they look great, they were inexpensive (since we already had the vases) and they were easy to make.

We started by buying a giant bin of ornaments from Stop & Shop for $8. You can probably get them cheaper at The Christmas Tree Shop or even the Dollar Store but we were on a schedule. For our tall skinny vases we chose a nice pattern of red, green and gold ornaments and made both of them the same.  These became decorations at our holiday bar.

For the fatter vases we just did red and gold because we used them as centerpieces on top of a  green tablecloth.  To make them we just piled the ornaments in there, dispersing the gold among the red as evenly as possible.

5 minutes - Done.  We have beautiful holiday decor and centerpieces and they cost us no more than $8.  This is a great project for leftovers!

If you want to try this out but you don't have leftover vases I would suggest checking out the dollar store.  I know they had some similar vases to this when I was looking for wedding centerpieces.  I also suggest, as always, checking out your local thrift store.  You'd be amazed what you might find!

Keep an eye out for posts on some of the other fun stuff we tried out at Thanksmas this year!