Tobacco Cloth

It's stunning but for me, that's just too much work to do yourself. When would you be able to set it up? The night before or the day of? Will the venue supply you a ladder? They may not for liability purposes. I would try to make room in your budget to have them do it.

It is stunning and I am all for diy and saving money but that looks like a big under taking....someone mentioned on another post that their venue wouldn't let them hang things like that unless they had a liscenced decorator do it. So maybe check with your venue before you order the fabric?

View Quoted Comment My fiancé is a carpenter so we have the ladders. But, it could be a ton of work the day before or the day of. Maybe I’ll just hire them.

View Quoted Comment My venue said we can hang whatever we want, nail, staple, tape anything to the dark wood beams. We do have ladders because my fiancé is a carpenter.

I bet you could hire some people to hang them for you at a lower price than $1500. That's three times as much as the cost of the cloth. It may be worth exploring a bit before you hire the actual venue or take on all that work yourself.

I'm not sure how you think you can do that for $450. There has got to be hundreds of yards of fabric there.

I would imagine a professional doing this would use a scissors-lift, rather than scrambling to move ladders around. It is absolutely stunning, but I'd think long and hard about doing it yourselves. No matter how adept a carpenter your FH is, how much experience does he have hanging decorative fabric and lights? Will he quickly get the draping right/even -- or is it going to take some time/trial & error to figure it out while they are installing? And, unless you literally have access to your venue for a couple of days before & after, do you want him and his "crew" spending the day of and your wedding night/morning after putting up and taking this all down? You priced the fabric and it's going to cost you a third of the installed price. What about the lights? How much more will they cost you? Once you have the total cost, divide the remainder by the number of hours FH and his helpers are going to spend installing and removing, and decide if it's worth it to you. (As an alternative, how many hours would either/both of you need to work for pay at your regular rate to earn the $1500 -- then ask yourselves which makes more sense.)

It's a completely different scale, but the only last minute DIY we did for daughter's wedding was put cookies into cute bags for the favors; not hard, but the cookies were fresh and fit about as perfectly as possible into the bags, so we had to handle them very carefully. We had a narrow window of less than 3 hrs between the latest we could pick up the cookies (so they'd be fresh) and when we had to have them packed to drop off at the venue when we went there for the rehearsal. I have to tell you, that was the ONLY part of the week that was stressful for us. More cookies broke than we anticipated, daughter/bride was getting a million text msgs that were super distracting to her, it was pouring out and FOB and groom were getting soaked trying to load the cars.... It didn't take long until we were all snapping at each other. Did we get the favors done? Yes. Did the short tempers blow over quickly? Yes. Looking back on it, is there anything related to an absolutely perfect wedding we could have/should have done differently? Yeah, I'd skip those favors or do something else that didn't require last-minute assembly.... The draping is absolutely GORGEOUS though, so I completely understand why you want it. Good luck!

View Quoted Comment 60 yards (180 feet) are $105 each. If I by four it’s only $420. I’m estimating, but the beams are about 20 feet high, so 44 ft per draping x 4 for the beams and then additional draping for across the room width wise x 2. The cafe/twinkle lighting is already in the venue and comes with the rental.

View Quoted Comment I’m going to do more research! Thank you! That’s a really good point.

View Quoted Comment Thank you! That’s exactly what I want to avoid, added stress, but I also want to save some $.

View Quoted Comment Tobacco cloth is really thin and about 36 inches wide. Once it's gathered attractively, that 36 inches will be about 12 inched. You'll need more than four bolts to come anywhere close to that look. I'd estimate at least 8 bolts per support beam if you want any fullness and the ability to drape at all.

I love it!!

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Also, unless you've worked with fabric lengths of 60 yards or more a lot, that much fabric is going to be bulky and heavy to move & store. You'll have to keep it in long continuous lengths until you have it hanging so the lengths are right, then you'll be cutting it as you go. As it comes off the bolts, someone will have to constantly turn the bolt as it's unrolling so it doesn't end up a a twisted mess. I tried to do something similar many years ago for a 50th anniversary, on a much smaller scale, using tulle as a swag on the front of continuous banquet tables. It turned out okay, but not anywhere close to what I imagined. Mim is right about it taking a LOT of fabric to get this effect. The biggest swags on the ceiling look like the "swagged fabric" is easily 4' wide (probably more) and you figure it will minimally take 2-3 times that width of fabric to get it to drape like that -- so you're probably looking at needing fabric that is an absolute minimum of 96-144" WIDE to get this look. (Think about semi-gathered curtains; they take a minimum of 2-3 times the rod length to have even soft gathers. However wide your fabric is, the swag will likely be 1/2 to 1/3 that wide. So even 60" wide fabric is only going to be 20-30" wide once swagged, on a 20' high ceiling, that's going to look like you hung crepe paper streamers. I'm not trying to be mean, just encourage you to work out the actual requirements to get what you want.) Again, I'd really think about the trade-off on this DIY. If you can pull it off, you should think about hiring yourself out to do it for others.

View Quoted Comment Bummer! I think it’d cost me more in the end 😩 I’m going to just hire the event company to do it.

View Quoted Comment Very wise choice

View Quoted Comment I think you will be much happier in the end with the results of you do that

View Quoted Comment I agree! Thank you!