Category — reception decor

… but barely

I spent a lot of nights making tissue paper flowers. 

I thought I made enough of them.

I didn’t. 

So my mom was a champ and spent an entire day making enough with me. 

And now they are done! And pretty!  And I love them!  Here is how you can make your own.

I followed Martha’s how-to, but hers leaves a lot to the imagination so i thought i would fill in some blanks for you Here is how i made my pom poms, step by step.

Step 1. Gather your supplies. Cut your tissue paper into 5″x10″ rectangles.  Martha says to use a special covered wire, I just used the silver kind, worked out fine. I got it at Michael’s. Scissors.  What you will also need are the styrofoam balls. You can get these at most craft stores. I bought mine in LA at this huge craft store so they were pretty cheap, which was nice. That was also where I found the marigold tissue paper, which I was having a hard time finding in stores.

Step 2. Fold. Fold the paper 4 sheets at a time, in 5′8ths of an inch folds. (Does that make sense? Fold it a little less than an inch thick) Do your best to be precise and fold it the same the entire way. Sometimes at the end I had to trim a little off for it to be even.

3. Check. (This isn’t really a step, more of a “this is what it should look like now” picture )

Step 4. Attach the wire and round the edges.  I cut my wire into 4″ to 5″ strips.  I then folded it at the center over the tissue paper and then twisted it all the way down, pretty tightly. You will cut the twisted wire later to about a half inch length, but it is easier to work with when it is long, and wire is cheap I then rounded the edges of the paper. You can do it rounded or pointy, it is up to you!

Step 5. Separate.  Carefully separate the 4 pieces from one side and then the other (rather than alternating sides)  It is ok it if tears once in a while, you won’t be able to tell once they are all close together on the ball. Just an FYI, for a few of the balls we had to use fuchsia tissue paper from Paper Source, and it was much thicker paper and more difficult to separate. 

Step 6. Prep the ball.  I took another 5″ piece of wire, wrapped it around my finger and twisted the ends together. (Actually, my bridesmaid Natalie made the hoops Thanks Lie!) I then put a little hot glue on it and stuck it all the way into the ball. This will be what we wrap the ribbon around later.

Step 7. Prep the flowers. I am not certain that hot glue is necessary, but we made these 2 months in advance and did not want any flowers falling out. Put a dab of hot glue right on the base of the flower, where the wire meets the paper.

Step 8. Place the flowers. You can see in this picture how short I cut the wire.  If you leave it too long it will bend when you try to put it in and that is no bueno. Place the flowers into the ball, close together. This is where I miscalculated. I had originally thought that it would take 18 flowers to cover one of the larger balls, but once I made sure there were no bald spots and they were nice and full it was more like 30. Better safe then sorry, make a lot of flowers!

Step 9. Attach ribbon and enjoy!  I bought two kinds of pink ribbon and alternated. We decided we will hang them in clumps of three, two clumps over the cake table and one clump over the guest book table. (Don’t hold me to that!)  We weren’t sure how long we needed the ribbon to be so we made it really long just in case. You could use any kind of ribbon, twine, shoelaces, whatever! We were thinking of using fishing wire to make them look suspended but thought that may look too modern for our space

I hope this helps some of you out there to do your own!  Although folding all the flowers got pretty tedious, I am so happy with the end result!  They were very easy to put together and will add a big pop of color without taking a lot of money from our wallets!

I have made 108 tissue paper flowers.

I have 4 medium sized styrofoam balls.

I have 4 small styrofoam balls.

4 medium @ 18 flowers each = 72

4 small @ 15 flowers each = 60

Total flowers needed: 132

Total flowers I will make, just to be sure =150

Flowers needed: 42

Totally doable.

I need one more day off. Tomorrow can’t be Monday already… can it? Ugh.  The weekend went by so quickly.  We went up to Ventura for a memorial, had dinner on the pier and then I spent a good portion of today shopping and then eating at my moms house. A weekend full of good things, but a busy one. I now need a day of rest. Let me get to the stuff you are interested in before I bore myself, and you, with more boring details

Some gorgeous shoes from the one and only J. Crew

And a wedding filled with gorgeous details by the one and only Matthew Morgan.

I love how Whitney of Darling Dexter clustered her globe lights. Very nice.

And we sent out our invites today!  Here is a sneak peak I will show you the entire suite next week.

Some of my favorite things around the blogging world right now.

These gorgeous photos, but even more so the letters LOVE on the guestbook table  

This awesome shot by Hugh Forte.

These bright beautiful spring flowers from The Brides Cafe.

And this. Only because I love Swiss Family Robinson and as a kid (who am i kidding… still as an adult) wished I would get stranded on an island so that I could live in the trees

What. a. week.  Sorry for the lack of posts at the end of last week. Wednesday night I went straight from work to an Angel’s game to see my man get presented an award on the field (!), Thursday was dinner with the family and Friday night was the rehearsal dinner for my friends Saturday wedding! The wedding turned out gorgeous, and was so much fun!  Two things I took away from it though: 1. Hire at least a day of coordinator.  The groom produces events for a living so they had most of it under control, but for things like getting the ceremony started and doing the grand entrance, having one person in charge would have smoothed thing along a bit. and 2. bring a dress to change into, even if you don’t plan on changing. Lauren’s bustle broke halfway through the ceremony and if it wasn’t for the little dress she had brought to drive away in I think she might have ripped off her own train!!!  And with that, a few pictures form the event

First, the guestbook I made for her wedding shower, finally completed with images from the shower and a few from Vegas

Lauren getting dressed. Her photographer wasn’t going to be there while she got dressed so I kind of took over and did the best I could

Driving to the site with her dad in an awesome car.

Both the ceremony and the reception were held at the Ole Hanson Beach Club in San Clemente and it was just gorgeous! The grooms company, TGIS, put everything together, including this lounge that they had set up at the reception.

An awesome ‘tree’ on one of the food station tables.  Rather than a sit down dinner they had a kind of glorified cocktail party with food stations serving things like mini pot roast in a martini glass. Delicious! The best food by far though were the chicken enchilada popsicles. Mmmmmmm.

I spent the day with a slight headache (open bar+another bar on the way home= trouble) but we did manage to buy ourselves a little travel book for our honeymoon  We thought we were going to go to Vancouver but changed our minds… I will reveal the destination this week because I will need some advice on things!

Hope you all had a wonderful weekend!

With 3 months to go I am in full on DIY mode. Not a day goes by that I don’t fold a few tissue paper flowers or open my ‘To-Do’ list.  I am not going to lie, I feel a little stress, but only because this is really happening and there are things that need to get done.  I try and remind myself that if I were to not do a single thing from today until July 18th, I would still have a dress that fits, a priest to marry us, and a restaurant to feed us. Basically, no matter what, the basics are done, taken care of, nothing to worry about.  It is things like decorations and the little details that only myself and a few others will notice that I am worrying about now.

This weekend involved working on a few different wedding projects.

Testing out different mixtures of my ink to find just the right color for the napkins:

Folding a ton of tissue paper flowers and photographing it along the way (once I complete one I will do a how-to post ) :

Aaaand, we went to Paper Source to get the paper for our invitations! I printed the invites and the RSVP’s. All that is left is the directions card and labels and we will be set!  I have given myself a May 1st deadline for getting them done… We will see how that goes

How was your weekend?!  Productive? Lazy? Busy? I vote for 3 day weekends every weekend… I am pretty sure no matter how your weekend went, you wish you had just one more day, I know I do

That is what I have been doing each night.  I come home, make dinner, sit on the couch and fold fold fold, separate separate separate, and repeat.  It will be worth it. yeah.

Also in the ‘on it’s way to being done’ category, the design that will be gocco’d on the napkins

So the other night we went to ikea (yes, that is what I do instead of blog, I go to ikea ) I was originally looking for these two items:

But instead I walked out with these amazing items, all of which will be used on our kids table.

Butcher Paper:

Paper cups to hold crayons, candy and whatever else I decide

And matching paper napkins

I am so glad I added that pink to our palette!

I had the itch to add a little kick to our wedding colors. And because Bryan is the best fiance ever, he is letting me add them Check out the new color scheme:

We will just be adding some pinks, corals, salmons,just a range of prettiness! Some inspiration I have found around the blogosphere:

The range of pinks and reds will be mixed into the bridesmaids currently marigold and white bouquets, into the mason jar centerpieces, into the Pom Pom decorations, and I am contemplating a fuchsia RSVP envelope to go inside the current grey outer envelope and white paper invites.   I am super duper excited. Yes, super duper. 

Images: Mine, snippet and ink, snippet and ink, careykirk, the knot, the knot, snippet and ink.