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“WFW” Book Centerpieces – Final Reveal!

Creating with the Stars

 

Yes folks, I’m throwing my blooming books wedding centerpieces into the ring to try out for Creating with the STARS!!  Click over to vote for me – the stars pick the top 11 and the submission with the most clicks gets the 12th spot! Find my submission in the linky party (Scroll to #177) and CLICK ON IT! Wish me luck!

And if you landed here because I asked you to vote on my Facebook page – thank you! Success!

And now back to our regularly scheduled program:

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Prepare yourself folks.  I’m jam packing this post with lots of pictures because I still have a ton of wedding projects to share. Last we left off on the topic, I was a string-gluing fiend, trying to get my “books” in order for our centerpieces.  After I finally got all of our “pages” glued on, next up were some finishing touches – another layer of spray paint (they got a little scuffed up from being handled constantly), some gold paint on the spines, cutting the actual holes for the planters, and a few layers of spray sealant (to avoid more scuffing).

 

Imagine my elation when I realized I needed 20+ somethings that were a few inches tall to raise the books off of the ground while spray painting and I knew just the thing to use:

 

I blame/am proud of the fact that I have so many shot glasses because I went to college here: Go Danes!

After a long time of looking for alternatives, we finally decided to just keep our little succulent plants in their green plastic pots, and we simply cut holes in the top of each book.  The cardboard was surprisingly hard to cut through, and we ended up using a combination of hammering holes around the circumference of our circle-to-be, and then using a pair of heavy duty shears to cut away the opening.  The outcome wasn’t the cleanest, but once the pot was in there, it was hardly noticeable.  I contemplated adding a paper doily to the edge, or draping some more burlap around the edge, but in the end, we were getting lazy and running out of time.  I was overall extremely happy with how they came out!

 

The table numbers were hand drawn on resume paper – quick, cheap, and easy!  I had tons of this turquoise wire from a failed project and decided to make my own table number holders by simply wrapping the wire around the mouth of a water bottle.  I added my paper rosettes to my succulents and we were practically ready to go.

 

 

Those tall succulents on the right were actually called a “matrimony” plant!

The table runners were another agonizingly long project, strictly because of the volume. Twenty two runners ended up costing me approximately $130, which was muuuch cheaper than renting linens.  I simply cut out strips of the rosette fabric 120″ x 6″, and with my 4″ burlap strips folded over creating a hem around all four edges, they ended up being approximately 122″ x 9″.

 

Helper Cats
My god they love to iron.

I found it worked easier if I ironed the burlap in half first, then went back and covered the edges of the rosette fabric and inserted my iron on hem tape on the top side.  I didn’t bother adding it to the bottom because it seemed to catch enough as it was, and since there was already a nice iron fold, I wasn’t concerned about it coming apart.  I also purchased plain white 124″ x 14″ table runners from a wholesale linen company for $3.30 a piece, and rented gold linen napkins through our tent company. They looked great together!

I plan to sell off most of this decor now that the wedding is over – once I get my inventory organized (some people took some things after the wedding as keepsakes so I need to figure out how much I have left of each  item) I’ll be back with a post of what is available! Leave a comment if you are interested in anything or would like more explicit details on how to make any of these items yourself!

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Wedding Fun Wednesday – Paper Rosettes

Since craft stores like Michael’s aren’t exactly around the corner, I actually make plans with friends to hit it up.  Unfortunately, my next trip to Michael’s isn’t planned until this coming weekend.  So any progress on the faux book centerpieces and other projects are on hold until I can stock up on more string and spray paint and fabric (and the list goes on…).

In the meantime, I found this awesome paper rosette tutorial via Pinterest. I’ve tried a few others…like this one, and this one, and maybe it’s me, but I just wasn’t digging how they were turning out.  I love what the original creators were getting – but I wasn’t getting the same effect when I was doing it myself. The tutorial I stuck with only required a few simple items, namely paper, a glue gun, and wire:

The original tutorial is super easy to follow from 100LayerCake – so I’m not going to try to recreate it here.  From my own experience, it seemed to work best if I rolled the length of each petal around a pen, so that it would attach to the stem more easily, withoutcrinkling the paper, then rolling the tips of each petal in my fingertip, in the opposite direction that I rolled the length of the petal:

 

 

 

 

 

I made a handful so far – my first one had some more space in between each petal as I fanned them out, but for the next few I glued in the petals a bit more snugly.  I LOVE how they came out.  They are quite sturdy too, so I know they will be fine 8 months from now when I actually need them for the wedding. My intention was to add these to the real flowers and succulents in the centerpieces only, but I think these might even be sweet enough to make it into the bouquets and boutineers! What do you guys think?? Made any paper flowers lately? I’ve got some more paper crafts I’ve been slowly working on to show you next week.  With the monotony of some of these projects, and the sheer amount of items I need for the wedding, I’ve been skipping from project to project every couple nights to mix things up!