This Wedding Wednesday post is uber exciting. Why? Because I made one of our first purchases for the wedding. Oh yeah…I bought us some lights for the wedding tent. I capitalized on the post Christmas 50%/75% off holiday decor sales and stocked up on some Christmas lights turned wedding lights. I love the idea of using Christmas lights to decorate our wedding tent for several reasons. One, if you get the lights in white you’ll never know that they’re meant for the Christmas season. Two, you can reuse them to decorate your home for Christmas. And three, if you get them post Christmas and stalk all the local stores, you can get one hell of a deal. Check out my loot.
I only paid $30 for over 200 feet of large, LED white lights and 10 boxes of the mini lights. Score! Picture me in Target/Walmart/Job Lots/Lowes/Lowes again in the aisle doing the happy dance and sporting one seriously sexy smile. The dance may or may not include the running man and a rousing round of the hustle.
So of course there’s a story attached to my shopping excursion and of course I’m going to share it with you. I decided to go shopping Tuesday night thinking I could avoid a crowd (you know…the day after Christmas crowd) and there would still be tons of lights left over. Um…no. At Target, I found nothing. Picture the not so happy dance involving a sad face and a frantic phone call to Colby. Then I hit up Lowes #1 (the one in Bangor) and again found nothing. Enter frantic phone call to Mom. She suggested Walmart. Typically I’m not a Walmart kind of gal but I was willing to brave it and bingo….I hit the mother load. This is where the happy dance came in to play. I still didn’t have quite enough for what I wanted to do so I went over to Ocean State Job Lots (Colby’s idea) and found nothing, but then trekked to Lowes #3 (the one in Brewer) where I bought them out of the mini lights.
Now, just what is my lighting plan? I’m glad you asked. First, I had several ideas in mind when I went shopping but really wanted to be flexible and see what I could find for lights and let cheap lighting availability guide my decision. Oh, and by the way, I use a lot of “I” here because Colby really doesn’t care. I ask him what he likes, quite often actually, but he seems to like just about everything I show him (although I do occasionally veto his ideas…seriously…a dunk tank Colby?….uh….no). But back to my point, I let my Christmas light purchase guide me to the perfect, yet creatively cute lighting plan.
But then I realized that I was going to need ALOT of lights (not to mention pom poms) to pull of this configuration. Thus, this is the inspiration for the official Colby/Angie wedding tent.
Oh yeah, those are some DIY twine ball lights. So the plan is to use the larger lights and line the perimeter of the tent along the seam where the slopie ceiling part meets the wall (or where walls would be if the tent had walls). I purchased enough lighting and a little extra to line the tent. The mini lights will be used for the innards of the twine balls to create some magical illumination. So there you have it, way too many words about Christmas lights turned magical wedding illumination. With that, I bid you all a good night.
