Gorgeous Barn Wedding Decor on a Budget

By Abbey

This used to be a 90-year-old horse barn with stalls made of cypress. But sadly, it burned down to the ground in a fire several years ago. In its place the owners built this structure, a 50 x 80 foot metal frame building on a concrete slab covered in old cypress boards, with a tin roof. Their daughter envisioned bringing it back to life and transforming it into a magical space for her wedding reception. And with a little inspiration from Pinterest, and this cheesecloth from OFS, she did.

OK, so the cheesecloth wasn’t the only star. Professional creative collaboration and the hard work of her family played a huge role too. Isn’t it stunning?

Huge thank you to Anita, Margaret the bride and Kaylynn Marie Photography for sharing this beautiful idea with us.

How in the world did they do it? Well, Anita, mother of the bride, shared the story of how the idea came to fruition with our customer service manager, so here are some of the details:

“[My daughter] and I collaborated with our caterer/events coordinator, Dawn Abraham, who is amazingly creative, and my neighbor, Aimee English, who is an interior designer and came up with a plan. We had a budget, so I needed to use the least expensive fabric I could find that would give us the effect we wanted. I found Online Fabric Store, ordered some samples of fabric from your site, the #90 cheesecloth looked like it would work, and the price was right!

We used twine to figure out the length we needed for each panel. I sewed two widths together lengthwise for each one, then sewed cording into a narrow hem on each end so we could gather the 80 inches into about 36 inch widths. Cutting (on the floor) and sewing each panel took about 45 minutes, and there were twenty-one panels. I worked on them over six weeks’ time.

We had an electrician install outlets along the center of the roof so that we’d have an electrical source for the lights. That also served as an anchoring point for one end of the panels. The other end was attached to cup hooks at the top of the side walls. Two rows of mini-lights, 150 each, were encased in each panel. On the low area under the loft, the panels were a little longer and I sewed a gathering cord across the center of each so that it could be secured to the ceiling in the middle over the buffet.

There was some trial and error involved, to be sure, before we achieved the look we wanted. Using a man-lift, my husband and son installed the lights on one weekend a month before the wedding and the panels and grapevine balls on another weekend, two weeks before the wedding.

It was a lot of work, but the effect was quite stunning, and needless to say, our daughter was very pleased and said it was more beautiful than she had imagined it could be. That made it all worthwhile!”

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