Wedding Table Decorations: Tips and Ideas

Fantastic wedding table decorations can be unique and elaborate, functional or purely ornamental. They help to set the tone for the reception, pick up on the wedding party colors, and offer wedding guests something to look at while they are eating or conversing with their seating partners. While there are many expensive options for embellishing the reception hall, putting together inexpensive yet tasteful wedding table decorations can be a fun activity that will also take some stress off of your wedding budget. Here are a few tips and ideas to help you get great decorations for next to nothing.

It is important to consider both the level of formality at your wedding and the planned activities at your reception when you are deciding what type of wedding table decorations to make. If you are having an evening ceremony with women in long dresses and men in tuxedos, your best bet is to stick with more formal decorations. A plain glass fish bowl holding a simple arrangement of flowers with marbles in your wedding colors to hold them in place is both inexpensive and elegant. For an informal beach ceremony, the wedding table decorations can be a collection of shells that the wedding party gathered the day before, arranged around a lit candle. These ideas take very little time and money to put together, but are beautiful and meaningful.

Some attention-getting centerpieces are ones that serve a particular function or purpose. If the bridal couple will be moving to a new house following their honeymoon, they can use the wedding table decorations as a way to let their guests know their change of address. You can wrap some home-made cookies in small cellophane bags, then tie them closed with a ribbon and a tag with the couple’s new address on it and arrange these little favors in a decorative bowl in the middle of each table. Or you could print out and decorate a faux menu to prop in the middle of each table, only instead of menu items, there can be wedding word games, stories about the couple, or ideas of things for the guests to do for fun after the reception has concluded.

If you are looking for a way to encourage conversation amongst your guests, consider creating wedding table decorations that say something about the history and courtship of the couple. Are you both avid travelers? Put together a few photo albums with pictures of places you’ve visited together, complete with captions, and display them on the tables in the reception hall. If one or both of you are into handicrafts, you can work together to design one-of-a-kind pieces of art to serve as wedding table decorations. These ideas can help to bring a unique, personal touch to your wedding reception without costing you a lot of money.

Handmade details can make a wedding so much more personal and special than the expensive wedding boutique alternatives. Making your own wedding table decorations can be as simple as deciding on a level of formality, choosing a functional or decorative design plan, or creating something from scratch using your own talents and skills. And no matter what idea you choose, don’t forget to have fun with it!