What To Do with Wedding "Junk"?

What do you do with all of your wedding junk? I kind of cringe when I typed junk, because I worked SO hard on it all to label it junk...but when it's been sitting in your living room for several months just gathering dust, right?

But I found myself coming up with a new use for my tissue paper pomanders. I won't take credit for it, actually...this was B's idea...at least I'm honest. I had originally thought that I would find a local buyer for my tissue paper pomanders since it's not as if they can be easily shipped. But after sitting so long in our living room, they were looking a little worse for the wear down on the bottom. A little squished, you could say.

So I decided to toss them out. B was appalled that I was so willing to let something that I had spent countless hours (he says that he counted the hours I spent making them and came up with 800) working on for our wedding. But really, what am I going to do with them?

As we removed the inner support wire brackets and compressed them down a little to put into the outside trash...a miracle happened. B came up with a brilliant idea to get one last use of out of these bad boys before throwing them away.

Do you want to see?

Ok, twist my arm...here's our newest Christmas outdoor decorations:

And here's a close-up...

Yep, we turned out tissue paper pomanders into hanging snowmen on our front porch! They're cute...even if we can only use them this one year! Just goes to show how creative some grooms can be!

Option #1 for My Hooks...

I posted some inspiration pictures for my shepherd’s hooks the other day. I love them all, but have to be honest and say that I’m drawn to the ones where there is a "kissing ball" or pomander of flowers.
Of course, once again, my problem with that idea is cost. Having someone make the flower balls out of fresh flowers is WAY expensive. And every time that I mention the slightest inclination to make some more tissue paper flowers, Mr. CC starts to growl at me. And Mama CC laughs…

But I see SO many posts where brides do the tissue paper pomanders in smaller sizes for their aisle décor and it looks SO good. Check out these. Could you tell that they were tissue paper?
So despite the laughter and occasional snarls coming from Mr. CC’s recliner, I practiced and made a tissue paper pomander in a smaller size just to see what I thought about it. I figured that the Styrofoam balls that were required were only $5 at my local Michael’s store, and I have an abundance of tissue paper left over, so I might as well try it out.

Here’s what I came up with.
What do you think?
Mr. CC doesn’t like them. He thinks that they look too fake, and since people will be closer to these pomanders than the ones that we’re going to hang (which he thinks look AWESOME!) it’s just not right. It’s too cheapy looking, is what I think that he wants to say, but won’t say for fear of hurting my feelings over something that I made myself. SO sweet…

Truthfully, I’m not sold on them. I think for one thing that the ribbon is too wide. This is the ribbon that I bought to hang the larger pomanders up high with…and it’s too much for these smaller pomanders. And I’m not certain that they don’t look too fake up close too. But what I did notice was that for the size ball that I used to make these here, I only used about 15-20 "flowers" on each ball. Maybe they wouldn't be SO expensive to do out of roses?? Or real carnations??

So what do you think that I should do? I’ve got a few more ideas in store for what I could do with these shepherd’s hooks…I’ll keep you posted on my progress!

Did something that you had stuck in your head as being PERFECT turn out not quite as perfect in real life?

The Checklist Looms...

I wrote about how special my Mother’s Day was. And it was special. But I wasn’t actually able to lay around all day and do nothing. It was nice for about half of the day, but that got old for someone as active as I can be…

So what else could be better than finishing a BIG wedding project?

What project is that you ask?

My tissue paper pomanders.

Yep, Mama CC, you read that right. All 6 pomanders are DONE! They are covered and hanging in the garage, which was kinda hard to do. The larger pomanders turned out quite a bit bigger than I had pictured in my mind. That’s completely fine that it worked out that way, as I was kind of worried about how small the pomanders might be when hanging from the large gazebo. So while I was happy that they turned out a little bigger than I had thought they would be, finding space in the house to hang them was a problem that I hadn’t really thought of ahead of time. I knew that making them early, I would have to store them somewhere, but didn’t really think about how hard it might be to store them.

I mean, they can’t just hang anywhere. They have to hang completely off of a wall, or from touching anything else, since laying against anything will squash the flowers. I think that they can be fluffed out once I’m ready for that, but we’ll see. And since the hanging situation made it impossible to hang inside the house, the only choice that I had was to put them in the garage.

Yes, Mr. CC, another thing has to go into the garage…this is our own private joke as the garage is already half full of stuff from when little CC and I moved in…I’m going to clean it out, I swear. But it might have to wait until after the wedding. It’ll be cooler then anyway…

So, hanging them in the garage meant protecting them not only from getting squashed, but also from getting dusty and dirty. Enter the big trash bags. Each tissue paper pomander is lovingly covered with a trash bag. We took the trash bag and opened it all up and poked a small hole in the bottom of the bag. We threaded the hanging ribbons through that hole and pulled the pomander up into the trash bag. A cheap trick, many thanks to Mr. CC’s quick thinking to our dust problem. So there they are, hanging in the garage, just patiently awaiting to be taken out, fluffed up and hung at our ceremony site in October. So…YEA ME! A day spent doing only what I wanted to do, watching the TV shows that I wanted to watch (go Bridezillas!) and finishing a project that has been looming over my head.

It feels good to have that one done! I am VERY glad that I listened to the advice that other brides that did that project had to give and started early on those pomanders. They are worth the work, and look gorgeous! All that needs to be done is to attach the black ribbons for hanging, so tissue paper pomanders…check!

That’s a big relief off of me to have that project finished.

So what’s up next? I need to call my hotel of choice and try to go ahead and get that block of rooms done…there are people that want to go ahead and make their reservations, and are waiting on me. Wish me luck!

Oh man, oh man. I’ve been a busy little bee!

This weekend was spent out of town again, but with my mom and little sister. My little sister is a teacher up in the Dallas area of Texas, and several months ago she mentioned to my mom that she was interested in going to First Monday Trade Days at Canton with my mom and me one month. My mom quickly relayed the invitation to me, and I accepted immediately. The hardest part was not deciding to go, but which month we would all go.

At one point or another, this past weekend didn’t work for all of us. I know that my mom (and sister, I’m sure) was wanting me to be able to bring along little CC on our girl’s day of shopping, but it just wasn’t in the cards. The month of April didn’t work at all for us, and June is almost too hot to go do an all-day long outside shopping excursion…so it was really looking like May was the best choice. And when I looked at my schedule a little closer, I noticed that no matter if we chose May or June, I wouldn’t have little CC on the weekend that First Monday is held on either month.

So I drove home this past weekend and spent the day with the girls. My step-dad was out of town, and Mr. CC opted not to come along…so it really was an all girl’s weekend. We had a BLAST!

We met my little sister in Canton and hand-delivered her some breakfast – compliments to Daylight Donuts in Athens (they’re honestly the BEST donuts anywhere!) and started shopping. We had to have walked five miles, and we were POOPED at the end of the day. But I had so much fun being with my mom and sister, catching up on their lives and shopping, that I didn’t notice until it was all over with how tired I was. That’s when you know that you’ve had a good day!

My mom and I topped the day off right with dinner at Rounder’s Pizza and I had my favorite pepperoni rolls, which are also the BEST that I’ve found anywhere, and watched two chick flicks. Bride Wars and Mama Mia. Both movies were cute, and we decided that both of our men would be thankful that we watched them with each other instead of with our men…

I got up early on Sunday and drove home. Mr. CC and I celebrated our anniversary since I had been out of town and he had been working too late on the actual date. He took me out to lunch and then had our bedroom filled with pink balloons and a bouquet of red roses waiting for me when we got home and I went upstairs. He had also done all of the laundry and cleaned up our house, all the while thawing out some dinner to cook for me. I was pampered girls, let me tell you!

After our yummy dinner was over, I sat down and got to work. I have ONE MORE flower pomander to make and I’ve been putting it off for a while now. I’ve still been making the flowers, but the box has been almost full of flowers for three weeks now, just mocking me because I haven’t started to attach them yet. That all changed last night. I got out my trusty hot glue gun and started attaching. Since I started a little late, I only got about halfway done with it. I was just about to stop when I noticed that I was actually out of white flowers, so that meant that I had to stop (since I’m mixing the white and cream flowers on the ball!) and go to bed. I was happy with my progress though, and I went off to bed feeling like it had been a VERY productive day.

With Mr. CC’s help, the house was clean, the laundry was done, AND I got halfway done with my LAST flower pomander….that’s a LOT of progress!

Here’s to hoping that I can keep the ball rolling…

Attaching Your "Flowers"

When first reading about this project, I got it in my head that Styrofoam would be a better medium for the ball than a paper lantern. I don’t know what I was thinking. Not only is it heavier and harder to work with, but Styrofoam balls are also expensive!

So I stuck to what the girls that had already done this project told me to do and went with paper lanterns.

I ordered my paper lanterns from paperlanternstore.com in the sizes of 10”, 12” and 16”. I was actually going for either 10”, 12” and 14” or 12”, 14” and 16” but the 14” paper lanterns were always sold out. I ordered in either white or off white, depending on what was in stock. And keep in mind that each paper flower stands about 2-2 ½” off of the paper lantern, so a 10” lantern becomes a 14” pomander. Even in varying sizes, the total order (with shipping) came to less than $20.

I would make a good pile of flowers before I did this stage of things. I actually kept a box of flowers in our living room. I would “fluff” flowers while we watched television at night and then throw them all into the box to wait until I had enough done to finish a pomander at once.

So, I already owned a hot glue gun. I used a mini glue gun, but size doesn’t really matter, whichever you’d prefer. Heat up the hot glue gun and open up your paper lanterns. They ship to you flat and you have to assemble them. This is easy and hard all at the same. Well, that’s not true. It’s not hard at all. I was just worried about sticking that metal bar through the fragile paper and ruining things…

Obsessive much, I know.

Anyway. Once your paper lantern is constructed, I would recommend starting at the bottom of the lantern. I did this backwards on the first one, and the poor flowers at the top got all smushed by the time that I finished because I kept sticking my arm into the lantern and smashing them. For me, it was easiest for me to get my hand inside the lantern at the top…if it’s easier for you to go through the bottom, then start at the top. Just start at the opposite end of where you plan on getting inside the lantern from. You’ll just want to make sure that the bottom of the lantern (since this is the part that when hanging you can look up and see) looks the best and is really full. (you can barely even see the opening, huh?)

Take a paper flower and fluff any smushing that may have happened while in the box.

Find the middle of the flower and stick your finger into it.
Keeping that finger in the middle, fold the fuzzy wire down flat.
Add a good dollop of hot glue around the head of the wire.
Allow the glue to cool for a minute before attempting the next step or else you WILL burn your fingers. Please, learn from my mistakes!

Once ready, position the paper flower on the “top” of the lantern and ease your hand other hand inside the lantern to apply pressure from both sides. See, why you have to cool the glue off? Now you are pushing from the center of the flower on the top and the center of the hot glue dot on the back. It will still be warm. Trust me. Just be careful and take your time. When the glue cooled a little and becomes just warm instead of hot, the flower is probably pretty firm. You can test gently.

Repeat the process for all of your flowers. When placing the next flower, I recommend getting them nice and close in together. This helps them look more real, and “fluffs” them even more. (The “mums” cover more ground than the “roses” seem to, which was also another reason that I went with them for my flower.)

Here’s a shot of a nearly finished lantern…just to keep you encouraged on your progress…
Also, you’ll notice that I alternated white and cream flowers. My artistic little sister and I thought that blending the two colors might make it more “real.” I have to admit that she was right. The first pomander that I did I alternated one to one. But it was too much white. Not enough to re-do the whole thing or anything, but just not quite right. So all of the other ones I have just put a white one in every once in a while. No real pattern or anything.

I will attach these to the underside of the roof of the arbor at our ceremony site with some black satin ribbon that I can find at any craft store.
So what do you think? Do you think that they look as classy and neat as I do? I LOVE them! And they have been worth the work. And since I can watch Platinum Weddings, Rich Bride/Poor Bride, My Fair Wedding and various other wedding shows while doing all of these activities; I have to ask the question…is it really work? I think not.

Did you have a project that when you started it you really weren’t sure how it was going to turn out, and then as it progressed you just fell in love with it?

The Promised Instructions on Tissue Paper Flowers

Ok – this post is also coming a little bit after the fact. Not that I’m already finished with this project, but I’m over the halfway point! Yea me!

No seriously, YEA ME! My parents think that all that I do is make tissue paper flowers because of this project, but it’s been SO worth every minute of hard work that I’ve put into it. The good thing? I started early. In reading other posts about this DIY project, I knew that I would need time to complete it all. So, since I finished the fourth pomander last weekend, here’s the tutorial.

First of all, a finished product snapshot so that you know what you’re working towards. Our venue has a fantastic arbor located at the ceremony site which will need just a little bit of dressing up for our wedding. For the most part, we don’t want to do a lot of extravagant decorating of the ceremony site –think soft, simple, rustic elegance. On a budget. Which for me, these tissue paper pomanders are just a lifesaver for my budget! Talk about bang for your buck! (On this one I tried to take it further away - more like the actual angle that it would be viewed from...)

So the process is actually not that difficult. You can buy tissue paper that measures 20”x30” and it works best. You can do any color that you want to use, but I read several posts during my research on this project that all stated that the lighter, softer colors seem to look more real. Since I wanted to construct 6-8 of these pomanders, I knew that I was going to be making LOTS of tissue paper flowers, and I went to papermart.com and purchased some tissue paper in bulk. I would highly recommend this if you’re making more than two or three of these. (Each ball can take up to 150-200 flowers depending on the size that you’re making.) And while I may not need all 400+ sheets of tissue paper that come in their standard pack of paper, the $25ish price was better than $2 a pack at Target or elsewhere and only buying just as many as I would actually need…

The rest of the supplies needed I found at Wal-Mart, but any crafting store will work. I purchased a package of the fuzzy wires (you used them as kids all the time to make things) in white so that they didn’t show. You also need some scissors. Since I had a good pair of crafting scissors that were nice and sharp, I didn’t buy any new ones.

OK, so we’re ready.

Take your sheets of tissue paper (I usually was able to cut 4 or 5 pieces at a time, but be careful because they tend to slip and slide.) and cut them into smaller rectangles that measure 10”x5”. This is easiest by laying the paper down longways and measuring off 5” increments and then cutting those new strips of 5”x20” in half. I marked the paper off along the bottom and top and right along the middle of the paper and just eye-balled the cutting between the ticks.

I then folded the paper over on itself to get the length cut.

Some paper has a shiny side and a flat side. I’m probably totally showing my Type A personality here, but stack them all up the same way. (This is mainly for any paper that has an iridescent sheen to it)

When you’ve got a good sized pile of paper, you can take a break from measuring and start to assemble flowers.

Take 4 sheets of the smaller tissues and stack them together.

Fold them with the short side down, in an accordion fold. Just back and froth all the way down to the end, making each accordian about 1/4" in size.

When you’re done, you can take a fuzzy wire (I did pre-cut mine into quarters) and tie off the paper fold. Just place the wire across the top of the fold and fold in half down the paper.
Twist it at the bottom to close it.
I chose to make my flowers a little more special by cutting the ends into a rounded point, which you probably noticed in the pictures. You don’t have to do this step, as it is hard on the fingers that use the scissors. I just preferred this look on my finished flowers. But you can make one of each and decide for yourself which look you’re going for. Not cutting them makes more of a “rose” look, and cutting them made them look more like “mums”

I would fold all the paper that I had cut before I made any of the actual flowers. Doing things in stages like I did isn’t necessary, but it was easier for me to focus on one aspect at a time, and I felt like I made more progress this way.

When you have a stack ready, it’s time to “fluff” the flower. Simply pull the accordion fold apart a little bit so that the paper handles a little easier.
Taking one layer of paper at a time, pull the paper up and away from the other papers. You have to be careful to pull hard enough, but not so hard that you rip the tissue paper. It’s not as fragile as you think that it is, but it will tear. So just practice with this step and don't be scared to ruin a few the first go-round. On the last layer it’s more like you’re pulling the other layers down, but you get the idea.
Repeat for all four layers. Keep in mind that the better you pull the first two layers, the more the second two layers will be able to “fluff.”
Repeat on the other side.
(A side view - so that you can see how tall it will stand up)

Viola! You have made a paper flower. Cool, huh? Next, I’ll teach you how to attach them together and make a pomander out of the pile of flowers that you’ve gathered…

Obesess much?

I saw the coolest picture on wedding bee a few weeks ago. This bride had made tissue paper pomanders to spruce up the décor at her wedding several months before I started reading Wedding Bee, and was asking what to do with wedding stuff like that after the wedding. In her post, she included pics of the pomanders, and I fell in love with them. And I don’t mean just a little bit, but the whole way off the deep end.

For about a week all that I could think about were those pomanders and how to make them and what I would make them out of, how I would hang them, how they would look at my venue, what colors of tissue paper that I would use…are you getting the point that I was a LITTLE obsessed? Or maybe you would (correctly) say that I was obsessed MUCH? Yeah, I admit it. I’m proud of it even.

It’s really all that I could think of. I had thought of using colored Japanese lanterns, but the thought of trying to match paper lanterns to the colors in my head, much less that meant that I would have to CHOOSE colors…it was just too much. But flower pomanders were gorgeous, and when hung from above, I could not tell in the picture that these were not real flowers.
I started pricing flowers online that week too, so this could have been some of the obsession factor!

Anyway, once I showed the picture to a few different people and made up my mind that I would have something like that at my ceremony site, I set about finding out how to make them. I re-read the post that had started it all, and I followed her links to her other posts about constructing the pomanders. Then I also went searching on the internet and found several tutorials, even a few video tutorials on utube.com that helped. Martha Stewart (god love her) also had several methods to use and tips to try. After compiling them all, it was really bugging me one night as I was lying in bed about how real they would look. And if they didn’t look all that real, then would they look more real from further away, as in once they were hung high and all?

I got a little obsessed about it, and decided that I would make one right then and there. No matter that I was beat-assed tired. No matter that Mr. CC thought that I should just lay down and relax. No matter that I couldn’t find ONE SINGLE PIECE of tissue paper during my crazy 15 minute search of our closet. Didn’t matter that I didn’t actually HAVE any of those fuzzy pipe thingys that you use in arts and crafts as a kid. I would make do.

And I did. Make do, that is. I ended up making a glittered (yep, you read that right) tissue paper flower while in bed that night. I used a piece of a scrunchy Christmas bow to tie it off in place of the fuzzy thingy, and yes, white tissue paper with multi-colored glitter flakes was the ONLY piece of tissue paper that I could find. But it was all worth it when I saw the end result…

It was NOT beautiful.

But that was ok, because I could see enough to know that it was not pretty because of the glitter paper. And the poor folding job of mine. I could see past all of that to know that with the right paper and a little more trial and error on my part, I could make these look like flowers from afar. I could see it clearly in my mind how it would look at our ceremony site and I was hooked.

Has anyone else ever gotten an idea in their head and you’re just not sure that you can make it work for what you’re wanting to do? And then when all of the pieces come together and it work out, it’s just almost magical? That’s what these tissue paper flowers are like to me. They are magical. They are magical not because they’re so great, but they offered me a cheap (if a little labor intensive) project that can replace a very expensive piece of my budget. And they follow the theme that I’m working for – simple, elegant and romantic. They give me flowers without costing what flowers cost. I L-O-V-E them!

I am expecting the paper lanterns in the mail today. Once I can see how it’s all going to come together, I will do a post on the whole project step-by-step. Just in case anyone else out there is as crazy as I am! And then, you can love them just as much as I do! Well, maybe not THAT much…