My mom, center, and my aunt made the eight-hour trek from Ohio for a few days to come help with wedding stuff. I can’t thank them enough!
Who else has a family that would drive 16 hours roundtrip to spend three days making flowers and putting together bouquets? My mom and my aunt arrived just in time from Ohio last week to help me with wedding projects.
Being far from family gets lonely sometimes.
I needed the most help with the bouquets, and I knew I really wanted to try use the paper roses I had made out of book pages. While I already had about 25 or so made, I had no idea the amount I would be producing over the three days they were here.
DAILY RECORD/SUNDAY NEWS — ABBY RHOAD
So this is the beginnings of the bouquets. I have the book paper roses and some papers made out of teal crepe paper.
In my last post, I talked about making teal crepe paper flowers and incorporating them into the bouquets with the book paper roses. But beyond those two elements, I wasn’t really sure what else to put in the bouquets to give them a little more depth and texture, and possibly even some more color.
My mom brought these great feathers with her: one set was black with a slightly green sheen, and the other were white, which she figured could go in my bouquet. She also brought a ton of teal ribbon and a few bouquet handles that had Styrofoam centers to hold silk flowers.
The first attempt yielded a bouquet that was pretty, but much too big for my liking. She used about 22 paper flowers. Multiply that by five bouquets, and that means I would be rolling and gluing petals nonstop for the next three months in hopes of ever making enough. My mom was, however, MUCH better than I am at arranging everything and making it actually look like a bouquet and not just a bunch of paper flowers smooshed together.
My bouquet, left, has the white feathers, while the bridesmaids’ bouquets have black feathers. My mom did such a great job assembling them.
While making the rounds at the area craft stores the next day, we bought some small Stryofoam cones that were about 5 inches tall (similar to these). Because they were smaller than the bouquet handles my mom had brought, I thought they might work better for a small bouquet.
We returned to my ridiculously overstuffed-with-wedding-supplies apartment and got to work. My aunt became a crepe paper flower-making pro, and I spit out as many book paper flowers as fast as I could.
After a lot of rearranging and playing with feathers and faux flowers, my mom had a smaller bouquet that I think looks great. The feathers were just what it needed to give it some texture, and adding a ribbon on the handle tied the teal in a little more than just having the crepe paper flowers did. We didn’t finish the back, since they will be holding the bouquets against their bodies. Christian isn’t keen on the back being unfinished, but I don’t think you can tell. What do you think?
Finally, some organization! I found a half-case of wine under the piles of books. Wedding bonus!
Now, this blog post makes this sound like easy peasy, but I assure you, it was not. Like I said, I’m sure my aunt’s fingers were blue from making so many crepe paper flowers, and my back is still stiff from sitting on the floor making paper roses. While these bouquets will mean a lot more than some silk flowers thrown together at Micheals or a live bouquet that will die shortly after my wedding, they did take work, and I can’t thank my Aunt Terri and my mom for all their work and for putting up with my ridiculous indecisiveness.
While my family and I had trashed the living room putting these things together, Christian got out an old baker’s rack I’ve had since college to house our wedding decorations and supplies so they weren’t in a heap on the kitchen floor anymore. I can’t believe how much better it feels having everything organized.
My wedding ring is finally here!
Also with my mom came my WEDDING RING! I’m so excited, but I’ve resisted the urge to wear it around. My mom got a great deal on it while she was shopping in Michigan, but I’ve had to wait about thee months until I actually got to see it in person. I love it, and I love that it’s very nontraditional.
Read my post on having a hard time picking a ring.
In other wedding-related news, Christian finished up our table numbers, which are cardstock and bamboo skewers (that’s right, like the ones you cook with), and they look fantastic! He also spray-painted our stock of empty wine bottles (drank by yours truly) and then decorated them with some really cool raised lettering we found in the scrapbook section of A.C. Moore.
These are old wine and vinegar bottles that Christian spray painted. He then used some raised lettering from the scrapbooking aisle.
I also addressed all of our invitations. I just used a calligraphy pen and tried to write in cursive to fake it. I couldn’t handle trying to learn and perfect real calligraphy before addressing 100-plus invitations.
We’re getting close, almost three months until the big day. I can’t believe it’s almost here. Things to check off my to-do list this week: put together a welcome packet for guests, decide on ceremony music, pick up postage for RSVPs, finalize registry, and research photosharing sites. Stay tuned!
Miss any Rhoad to the Altar posts? Catch up on all of them here.
Check out our Pinterest page to see where we’ve gotten a lot of our ideas.
