Decorating a wedding

I some how thoughtd that decorating a wedding myself would cheaper. Just like I thought that doing my own invites would be cheaper. It's not. Why? Cause just when you think that you have it perfect, you see one more element that needs to be added. Case in point, I just decided that my outer envelopes will need liners and my inner envelopes need paper bands, but I will get to that later.

As thought how to decorate the aisle for the ceremony I dreaded the cost of flowers at the end of each row of chairs. I saw this picture on theknot.com....

Lanterns! What a great idea! But lanterns are still a couple dollars a piece...I'm sure I could do better than that! A few months ago I downloaded an app for kusudama origami for big girl since she has discovered oragami and loves it. Then I ran into a blog post where a bride to be had used these for pew decorations.There are a lot of variations, of these flower balls and some very stunning, but finding instructions was all too difficult so I'm staying with the traditional ball. You can find some nice instructions here. I got out my stock of purple and green scrap book paper, made a bunch of 3" paper squares thinking that I would be well on my way to the 16 balls I think I will need. Not even close. I have enough for about 5. So I started searching for origami papers to make it out of. Wrong again, too expensive for the amount of paper that I needed. My next bright idea was to go through all of my old magazines and pull out any pages that had the same colors. Brilliant! That got me another two balls. Crap. Why didn't I think of it sooner....wrapping paper! Of course! It comes in every color and design imaginable, it's relatively cheap and there is usually a lot of it.

If you are thinking about kusudama balls for decorating keep a couple things in mind.

• They are time consuming. I can do one ball in about two hours.
• They take an insane amount of paper. I made mine with 3x3 pieces for each petal. They take 60 petals to make a ball. Do the math.

I'm thinking of doing the balls and a lantern on each end chair for a bit of overkill. Or just to annoy the guests sitting in that chair.

Of course buying 100' roll of wrapping paper in our wedding colors also gave me another idea, envelope liners and paper bands! Work continues on getting them together. I already have to buy more ink for the printer (magenta went first).

Another piece of advice, make sure you spell check your invites and all inserts. I did mine in photoshop and didn't spell check. The first thirty direction cards I printed I spelled south with an "r". Whoops. So I whited out the R and figure I will send those to people who are getting the courtesy invite but won't actually come.

I've also decided that printing our return address as well as the RSVP card envelopes will be too much of a pain, so I decided to create a stamp. Now the stamps that the paper source have are undeniably cute, but also too small and also expensive. But it turns out that you can have a stamp created from a jpg file very affordably. I chose a 2 7/8 by 1 3/8 self inking stamp for $18 from thestampmaker.com. I created the design I wanted in photoshop, uploaded it and tada! For $10 less than the cost of the papersource stamps, I have one that is large enough to stamp our address on the RSVP cards and will work for return addresses as well. It's also something that I can have Mr. Get Lucky do. As good as he is about all this wedding planning and DIY, I would love a little more help.


Well that is what I have for today! Or at least this morning...