DIY: Cake Topper

As with most things for our wedding, we are DIY-ing a lot of it. Mostly because we can. Partially because it's cheaper that way. Both Jeff and I are very creative and with our different strengths, we are making this house awesome. Ergo, our wedding will be awesome. Perhaps more so because of our super-sweet cake toppers we're doing!

The inspiration came from Pinterest, where I fell in love with these wood-burned, rustic elements for the wedding:

Picture via: Bragging Bags on Etsy

(Note, I JUST now followed the picture I saved on Pinterest and it led me to the Etsy shop where these are sold...maybe I should actually follow through all the links I have saved on there!)

With Jeff's woodworking skills (seriously mad skills: there's the two sets of kitchen shelves he's made me, rolling pin, TP cabinet in the bathroom, TP roll holder, coffee table, back door, potting bench...you get the idea) I figured that wrangling up a couple of love birds for our wedding cake wasn't going to be a problem.

I sketched out what I wanted, then he had me draw a mockup on cardboard to scale so he could cut out the birdies. He is also a scrap wood hoarder (well, he hoards more than just wood, it's pretty much anything that could be reused for something else, he keeps) and found a thin piece of wood that he could get both birds out of. Here's what we've done!

First bird cut out: Note that I can't change the order of these pictures on here...sigh

This is what we started with

We decided to letter both sides of the bird so you could read it no matter where you were around the cake

This will not be a question...lol

With the stake to stand up on our cake.

So one is finished and I'm just waiting on the other one so we have a pair of love birds for our delicious grasshopper cake. Total cost for this project was nothing except one hour of our time.

So what do you think? Is is a good cake topper or should I have just spent the $30 to get them from Etsy?