How to Make Your Own Personalized Wire Wedding Hangers

You’ve seen them all over Pinterest and Etsy and probably on the blogs of your favourite wedding photographers too – personalized wire wedding hangers. They’re everywhere. Yet tutorials for making them are, well… not everywhere. In fact, they’re totally lacking and seemingly absent. How is it that these hangers, which sell for an average of 30 bucks a pop, yet are fairly easy and cost less than $3 to make, lack online tutorials? I’m not normally a conspiracy theorist, but if I, or this blog post, disappear within the coming days, it’s probably safe to assume that a crazy Etsy seller isn’t happy with me for giving away industry secrets.

But seriously though, these hangers are easy peasy to make and are awesome for bridesmaid gifts and photos of the dresses. Better yet, they’re actually pretty darn practical since you need a hanger to hold your wedding dress anyways… you might as well make sure it’s pretty!  All you need is a little bit of patience and some basic supplies.

Let’s get started! By the way, the ones I’m making for this tutorial are for the wedding of some friends of ours… and the wedding is in MEXICO!! My husband is the best man and it’s going to be our first ever destination wedding and I’m soooo excited that I could, without a word of a lie, possibly burst. I can’t wait to be laying on the beach, toes in the sand, eating unlimited tacos and drinking piña coladas, dancing the night away with a ton of our close friends and family under the Mexican sky….sighhh.  Oh, sorry, what were we talking about again? Wedding hangers? RIIGGHHHTTTT. Okay, okay fine. I’ll stop dreaming about Mexico and tell you how to make them.

Supplies You’ll Need

• Hangers in your colour of choice (I buy IKEA’s Bumerang hangers because they’re super cheap at under a buck per hanger)
• 12 gauge floral wire (available in the floral section at Michaels or on Amazon – Amazon is definitely the cheaper of the two options as you get so much more wire for around the same price as Michaels)
• Needle nose pliers (optional:  put masking tape on the inside of the pliers to act as a guard so you don’t leave ridges from the pliers on your wire)
• Hot glue gun or superglue
• Drill with 3/16″ bit
• Ribbon in the colour and width of your choice

Step one:  Prep your hangers

If you have suit hangers, remove the bottom part that holds the pants. These usually come off pretty easily; just pull hard and then remove the little nails inside using the needle nose pliers.  If you bought regular shirt hangers instead of suit hangers, skip this step.

Step 2: Plan your lettering

Using a pen and paper, plan what you would like your wire lettering to look like – it doesn’t have to be perfect or to size, as this is just an outline! All that you’re doing is ensuring that your pen never leaves the paper; you won’t be able to cut the wire, so you gotta get creative with ways to cross your t’s and dot your i’s! (Trust me on this… I made these for the first time for my wedding and I tried gluing on the crossed t’s after the fact and, well, let’s just say it kinda looked like a mess and leave it at that.)

I tend to make my letters really loopy and girly with hearts for the dots on the i’s, but you can do whatever you would like! Remember, this is just an outline and it doesn’t need to be perfect!

Step 3: Get bending!

Grab your wire and straighten out a decent length. This depends on the length of your word or name, but I tend to be pretty liberal with this as there’s nothing worse than doing all the hard work of bending out the name and then realizing that one end is too short.

Then start bending! I don’t know why, but I always do a loop before the first letter (and at the end too). It’s just a habit of mine because I think it looks cute, but it’s totally optional and absolutely not necessary!

I’m not gonna lie… the bending takes some practise and you may go through quite a bit of wire before you finally get the hang of it. When I made these for my wedding, I probably went through 10 yards of wire before I was finallyyy able to make a name that looked moderately decent and somewhat legible. Be patient and don’t give up!

I do have some tips and tricks to make it easier (hopefully!) for you that I’ve learned over years of making these.

1. Don’t second guess yourself! Once you bend the wire, you won’t be able to make it look nice and straight again. Make sure that you’re committed to each bend that you make! Also, make your bends twist around the letters when you can. This will help add strength to your wiring and prevent it from all coming lose and getting wrecked if it accidentally gets snagged or tugged.

2.  Only use the pliers for very sharp angles and bend the wire as much as you can before using pliers. When you use the pliers, make sure that you are using the flat part of the pliers – closer to the wire cutter – and not the ridged area (see pic 1 below). The ridges will make little bumps in your wire and show the dark and not-so-shiny area underneath the coating. Moral of the story: it will look really sloppy and unprofessional. If you don’t trust yourself and think you might forget to use the flat part, or you’re worried you might accidentally snip the wire with the wire cutters, I recommend putting masking tape over the ridged surface of your pliers (see pic 2 below). This will protect the wire and ensure that you don’t get any ugly little bumps or dark wire innards showing up.

3.   Totally optional, but I like to twist my i’s, because it adds a bit more durability. I put the wire flat on the table and then, looking at the word straight on, twist right to left (twisting left to right will mess up your previous letter and decrease the space between the letters!) I usually do three half turns.

4.   Once you’re done, you can go and straighten the letters out, but try not to move them around too much or make any drastic changes. Remember tip 1: Commit to the bends and pleeease don’t try to straighten any wire out again as it just won’t work.

Step 4: Drill your Hanger and Attach the Wire

Using your drill, make holes using a 3/16″ bit where you’d like your wire to go. On suit hangers I tend to just use the holes where the nails that attached the pant hanger previously were. However you’re more than welcome to change the spot of the holes if you’d like.

Get an estimate of how far the wire goes in, and then measure where to cut the wire. If you’re nervous about this part, cut a little bit at a time. Do this until your word is centred in the hanger when the wire is placed in the hanger’s hole.

Using a hot glue gun, superglue or another type of strong adhesive, dab a small amount in the hole and then immediately insert the wire. Once the wire is inserted, bend the wire so that it is parallel with the top of the hanger.

Cut the wire and glue it on the other end ensuring that the wording isn’t too tight or too loose. You don’t want any letters to be cramped together or for any parts of letters to come apart. I recommend cutting a little bit from the end at a time to ensure that you don’t cut your wire too short. Also, double check your length by putting your wire in the hole before gluing it.

Step 5: Add the Ribbon (or other embellishments)

If you’re putting on a ribbon, tie it on and make a bow…

trim it…

And you’re done!

Here are all the hangers that I made for my friend and her bridesmaids. Did I mention that the wedding is in MEXICO?!

I really hope that this blog post was informative and helpful for any brides out there who want cute hangers for their wedding, but who can’t afford the $20 to $30 price tag for each one.

Fun fact about me: I LOVEEEE weddings and I love making things for weddings. If you want more DIY wedding projects, leave me a reply in the comments below and let me know what you’d like me to make! ↓

In the meantime, check out my Etsy store to see my printable wedding games and signs for sale!

Thanks so much for reading!