Wedding Craft Tutorial: How to DIY a Cardboard Cutout of Your Pet

So I got married last year and did a TON of craft projects for the wedding that I’ve never actually bothered to write about anywhere. Someone reached out to me today to ask about the cat cutouts at my wedding after seeing pictures of them on Offbeat Bride, so clearly there’s an audience for this sort of thing!

If you want to see our full wedding profile, it’s up on Offbeat Bride here!


This one’s pretty simple. Basically, I’m a crazy cat lady and I wanted to have cardboard cutouts of my cats Schrodinger and Ziggy Stardust at our wedding, but all the ones for sale online seemed to cost $30+ each! To save money, I ended up figuring out how to make my own.

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  1. I put my cats in their specially purchased sparkly pink wedding bowties and took as many pictures of them as I could for a few days to ensure I could get at least ONE decent full figure shot of both of them.

  2. I edited these photos and cut out a lot of the background to reduce the measurements of the sign I’d need (and also the cost!).

  3. I found the cheapest cardboard signs with a rigid core I could find online. I ended up sourcing these from GotPrint.com! I ordered two 9”x 24” rectangle signs with these images printed on them, with a kraft color core. There ended up being a lot of white space on the bottom of the signs, but I wasn’t worried, as I knew I could cut it out.

  4. Once the cardboard signs arrived, I used an exacto knife to cut out around the cats and make the final cutouts! Although to be exact(O!), I should note that my now husband John quickly decided he didn’t like how i was cutting the cardboard and took the exacto knife away from me and did it himself. Oh well. I tried.

And there you have it! Two DIY cardboard cutouts of my cats for about the cost of half of ones I found for purchase online! These were a huge hit at my wedding and it was a perfect touch!.