Homemade wedding cake topper adds a personal touch

Weddings often are costly affairs, but with enough advance planning and a little homegrown ingenuity, you can make things instead of shelling out for them.

Wedding magazines and Web sites help, too.

"There's nothing you can't craft for your wedding," says Darcy Miller, editorial director of "Martha Stewart Weddings" magazine. Among other items, she mentions gifts, decorations, flowers and the cake.

Ah, the cake.

The Knot Inc., which runs two wedding-related Web sites, surveyed the spending habits of 18,000 couples who got married last year, and found that on average couples spent more than $500 on a professionally decorated cake. There are ways to limit that cost, Miller and other experts say.

For starters, craft your own cake topper, and end up as well with a keepsake.

A recent "Martha Stewart Weddings" favorite, for example, was clustering colorful, craft-store butterflies along one side of a fondant cake, Miller says. Another: Top the cake with a tea cup, either from grandmother's inherited china or from your own, registered china.

Another lively topper comes from "Real Simple Weddings," an annual guide published by "Real Simple" magazine: Deputy Editor Jaimee Zanzinger suggests placing tiny images of the bride and groom in elegant frames on top of the cake. She's also seen small cornhusk dolls adorn a cake's top, and notes that many of these craftsy items can be commissioned.

For your own cake topper project, try this idea adapted from MarthaStewart.com

Dove Topper

Supplies:

Small block of Styrofoam

Foam glue

Scrap of cardboard for spreading the glue

Two hanks of white seed beads

6 stems of cotton lily-of-the-valley

2 branches of silk maidenhair fern

Hot-glue gun

Hank of alabaster-colored seed beads

2 millinery doves

Assembly:

1. Carve the Styrofoam into the shape of a birdbath, trying to keep edges rounded and smooth.

2. Working from the base, spread the foam glue in a 1-inch band completely around the Styrofoam birdbath. Attach the strands of white beads by spiraling them around the birdbath. Continue adding the glue and coiling the beads up the sides and onto the top until you have a 1/4-inch-wide band on top.

3. Arrange the lily-of-the-valley and fern branches into two half-arches; insert their stems into the center of the Styrofoam birdbath and secure them, using the hot-glue gun.

4. Glue on the strands of alabaster beads to fill in the top of the birdbath, spiraling toward the center.

5. Hot-glue doves in place.