Chandeliers look fantastic in all manner of themes, particularly glamorous and vintage. But contrast your chandeliers with natural plants and flowers and you get something even more distinctive—a stunning fusion of rustic charm and opulent beauty. Here’s our guide to making your very own DIY rustic glam chandelier and fern overhang.
What You’ll Need:
- Metal chandeliers (we used 3)
- A standard garden trellis painted white. Ours was four feet long, but the size depends on how you want to use it.
- Asparagus ferns
- Flowers of your choice (real or fake)
- Floral wire
- Garden shears
Instructions:
Step 1: Before you begin, you need to check whether or not your venue is suitable for a hanging display of this kind. That could mean asking for permission or finding out if they have the appropriate rigging you need.
Step 2: Your trellis will be the base of your overhang, so you need to begin by suspending it (e.g over your wedding tables). Use fishing line to attach the trellis to a couple of rigging points in the ceiling (we used standard ceiling hooks).
Step 3: Begin by tying a few stems of ferns together with wire.
Step 4: Wire this bunch to your trellis. We began at the front left side (approximately 10 inches from the end) with a long, low fern overhang.
Step 5: Wire another few stems of ferns together and add it to the opposite side of your trellis. We made it shorter than the first fern overhang; we wanted to avoid perfect symmetry, as that would make the display look less natural.
Step 6: Attach your chandeliers to your trellis. We had the middle chandelier higher, and the other two a little lower on either side. We were also careful to have the fern overhangs nicely frame the chandeliers.
Step 7: Repeat steps 3, 4, and 5 to add fern overhangs to the back edge of your trellis.
Step 8: Use individual fern stems to fill in the rest of the trellis. Point them in different directions to preserve that natural, wild, rustic look, and have some of them pointing down through the gaps in the trellis.
Top Tip: Attach the ferns more securely if you’ll be using your trellis outdoors; the wind may blow your ferns away! But if it will hang indoors, some of your ferns can be secured not with wire but by weaving one stem through another.
Step 9: Finish your overhang by adding small bundles of flowers. We used water picked wax flowers, but other options include fabric flowers or real flowers!
The Final Look:
The Details:
Other Ideas:
Hang little notebooks (which are perfect as unique little wedding favours) above a table as a storybook theme:
Suspend beautiful wire crowns to create a royal fairytale theme:
And for a more whimsical DIY overhang, check out our DIY Mini Bottle Overhang:
Find more wedding DIYs in our inspiration pages.
