Wedding Update and Dabble
In this week's TCDIY, Carly tries to incorporate her own vintage items into her wedding design. And, who's heard of Dabble?
The wedding planning is seriously underway, but I find myself conflicted with the DIY versus the hire-some-guy approach. There are a lot of aspects of setup and decoration where I feel confident with the DIY method, but then there are the obvious things that you just can’t do yourself.
I keep envisioning my mom and I prepping in the kitchen the night before the wedding, then creating a killer buffet for the reception dinner. But I guess that’s a pretty crazy thought when you’re dealing with over 150 guests and are trying to avoid a meltdown.
I suppose the real conflict is trusting your vision to someone else. I’m sure all of you DIY folk can agree that when there’s something creative to be done, you’d rather Do It Yourself! But I am willing to let go when it comes to the caterer and folks putting a tent in the ground—I just want to make sure that we still have direction.
In order to keep our plans cost-effective, I’ve been rummaging around our apartment to see what sorts of items would lend themselves nicely to outdoor vignettes. I started to pull things together and devised a test setup. For me, this was an easy way to get an idea of what I liked and didn’t like.
I pulled several personal items from our apartment, and I wanted to find ways of making them new again, or somehow use them differently. I liked the sentimentality of the selected objects, but I felt that I was missing color and a genuine purpose to the setup. I always see suitcases being used in vintage wedding blogs, but I feel that we should utilize something more meaningful than old spools of thread. Lots of times, the suitcases are used to collect cards, so that might be an alternative possibility.
The biggest takeaway from my design brainstorm was that plants look awesome in random places such as picnic baskets, ukelele cases, and old suitcases.
In the midst of rummaging through some of our things, I received an email from a woman who works with a Chicago-based company called Dabble. She asked if I’d like to teach a DIY class and get paid for it! I thought it was a scam, so I did some research.
After looking at their website, they seem like a hybrid of Living Social and Meetup. Classes are offered at a reasonable price, but the teacher will get paid only if people attend, obviously. Dabble, however, does all of the marketing for you, so filling a class should be relatively simple. Anyone can teach, anyone can attend. Classes are held at local community organizations and businesses. Sounds pretty neat, right?
They’re trying to expand their market to include Milwaukee, so if you have any skills that you’d like to share with the Milwaukee community, check out Dabble and let us all know how it goes.
If you’ve already heard of Dabble, please share your knowledge in the comments section below!
