Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Wedding Decor


With last week being a holiday, I only worked one day, but this week I'm already up to three, and I have another early day tomorrow.  Most work days I wake up around quarter of five in the morning.  Well it being Wednesday all those early morning are catching up to me.  I feel ready for bed, so I apologize now, if this is a little off.  I'm continuing with my One Year Wedding Anniversary series.  To catch up you can read  How We Met, our Wedding Stationary, and our Cupcake Toppers.  Today I'm going to share some of the decorations we had.  

photo taken by Tanya Keenan
Photo taken by Tanya Keenan
This was our favor, a Candy Bar!  All the guest loved filling up on candy before they left, and I didn't mind taking home any leftovers.  There really wasn't much leftover, but the salt water taffy, because I over-bought it.  The taffy was cheapest to buy in gigantic bags.  We really shopped around for this one, because this can get super spendy.  The good thing is candy keeps for a long time, so we started this a few months before the wedding.

I made a few hundred of these double layer paper flowers.  I used them all over the place.  We had the wedding in a historical building, so we were not allowed to hang anything or really do much decorating.  The place was fabulously beautiful on it own, but I needed to add my own little touch.  I love these beautiful flowers, I even made some of the paper for a small portion of the flowers.  If you'd like to know how I these cute dudes, you can check out this tutorial.

Here is an example of the my pinwheels.  These are larger than the ones I used on the cupcakes.  I used these for my centerpiece arrangements on the tables scattered around.  We didn't have assigned seating, or a sit down meal, that's just really not our style.  We had lush hors d'oeuvres served by waiters, and the guest were free to wander and mingle about.  Plus this saved us a big deal of money.  We did make sure to have a chair for everyone, so they could have a place to sit.   

Photo taken by Tanya Keenan
This is our thumbprint tree, and you could use this as a replacement for a guestbook.  I drew the tree months in advance, with colored pencils, and I wrote our names and date in black marker.  Before the wedding I had Michael's matte and frame it.  They were super helpful, they held onto the glass for me, and then after the wedding I gave it back to them to finish the piece.  

Photo taken by Kaelyn Michaels Ryan
I supplied the thumbprint tree with this cute stackable ink pad, a stack of scratch paper for people to test their thumbprints, and a cup of pens.  Plus I can't forget the basket of Handi Wipes, and the mini trash pale (with lid) for them to easily dispose of all the trash.  

Photo taken by either Tanya or Kaelyn
This is my brother Chris on the right, Aaron's sister Jessica, and his Aunt Teressa all using the thumbprint tree.  

Photo taken by Kaelyn Michaels Ryan
My husband didn't want to get rid of the guestbook all together, so I bought a cheap guestbook, and turned it into a scrapbook of Aaron & my kid pics.  It was a big success at the wedding.  This is Aaron's cute grandparent's Roland and Helen checking out the photos in our guestbook.  I'll make another post later that has some images from the actually guestbook.  

Wow, hope that wasn't too much.  Happy DIYing, chris!