Pom-pom Production Line

If you've been following along, you'll know that I have a lot of yarn pom-poms to make for our wedding toss. We're talking 300-500 little balls of yarn. And, since I'm not completely insane, I recently enlisted a team of yarn wrapping and trimming divas by bribing them shamelessly with the promise of wine and snacks. Meet my crew:

Bridesmaid Emily enjoying a sample of the white sparkling wine we'll be serving at the reception -- in one of the champagne flutes I've acquired for my bridal party. See her wrapping the yarn around her fingers? She's following the direction on this super easy tutorial for Bella Dia.

Stephanie who sweetly picked up yarn for perhaps the first time to help me with this daunting wedding project. She's a self-proclaimed non-crafter, but she did a great job. Here she's starting to trim the spiky ball of yarn you get after you've wrapped the yarn and cut the edges.

And wedding invitation goddess, Laura. Who is designing all my wedding stationary and left her gorgeous little boy at home for a day to be a part of my sweatshop. Check out her design work at http://www.lauramcdougall.com/. Her pom-pom is almost done in this picture.

And, what kind of progress did we make you ask? Well, we made exactly 100 pom-poms in just under three hours.  I'm keeping them in a large gift bag I got at our first bridal shower. Maybe I should put them in something smaller so they look more substantial, huh? I've continued to make more on my own, so now you can't see the bottom of the bag anymore. That's progress, right?

So, do you see my vision? Can you see these purple and tan and black poofs gently flying through the air as we walk down the aisle as husband and wife? I can!

How to Make a Veil

Have you seen the price of veils these days?! I don't know about you, but, frankly, I felt insulted when anyone assumed I'd actually pay over $100 (the sale price, no less!) for a few yards of fabric I was only planning to wear for 60 minutes at the most. Thus, the journey of making my own veil began...

The first thing I did was to do my research, i.e., surf the web. I needed to look at photos to decide what kind of veil I wanted and find DIY tutorials for making your own veil -- which of course I found on blogs written by other brides in my same situation. Apparently, I'm not the only one offended by high-priced "bridal" accessories. Here's the tutorial that helped us the most.*

After I decided on the basics -- An ivory two-tier veil with some kind of edge beading, I went shopping with my crafty bridesmaid Emily C. It didn't take long for us to find what we needed at Hobby Lobby. Here's a snap shot of our receipt:

4 yards of shimmery ivory tulle ------------------ $5.50

Silver and gold seed beads and beading needles --------------------- $3.75

Ivory ribbon, thread and hair combs --------------------- $5.40

For a grand total of $14.65 in supplies! Yea, savings!

K, so I think I've set the scene. Here are a few pictures of the work in progress:

First, step is to measure and cut. The great thing about making your own veil is that you can make it as long as you want. We designed my veil to make sure that the first and second tier highlighted rather than hid the details on the back of my dress. Here's my tulle folded in half and laid out on my living room floor.

How did we get those curved edges? Trial and error. We tied a piece of yarn to a marker (genius tip from Emily C.) and drew an arch on a piece of cardboard until we had a good template for our curve. 

After we had our veil cut, it was time to start beading. We decided to finish all of the edges with seed beads in a silver-gold-silver pattern with a space in between each grouping, like this: 

When we finished the beading, we gathered the fabric where the two tiers divide, sewed stitches through the fabric, pulled the string to gather it together, sewed the string to the comb and then wrapped the comb in pretty ivory ribbon.

Here's a picture of the veil, with beaded edging. See how it shimmers? Want to see it on? You'll have to wait until my hair trial in April. I will tell you that I brought it to my last dress fitting and it matches perfectly!

Did you make your own veil or DIY another "bridal" accessory for your big day? Were you happy with the results?

*Note: I may sound very confident about this process after the fact, but Emily can tell you I was fairly nervous to jump right in. In fact, a friend actually gave me a few yards of tulle she'd used as decore in her wedding so I could make a "practice" veil and walk through the tutorial with some room to make mistakes and learn the best way to go about things. This gave me a lot more confidence when it came to making the "real" veil. I highly recommend it.

Rice? Birdseed? Not us.

If you've been following along with my posts, you'll remember that our ceremony and our reception are all in the same place. Since our guest are staying put, they won't be positioned outside the church steps for the traditional birdseed toss at the bride and groom. This is one of many wedding rituals we're doing "our way." (Okay, really my way, though Erik does pop in for a decision now and then.)

When you think about it, birdseed isn't really the tradition anyway. Before the myth that rice is harmful to birds (I looked it up. It's baloney.), rice was the seed of choice. Depending on what culture you're looking at, it was a symbol of good wishes, fruitfulness, fertility, warding off evil, etc. Today, the "toss" has turned into more of a celebratory gesture like throwing a graduation cap into the air. I've seen wheat, those champagne-bottle firework poppers, bubbles, pennants (to wave not throw) and bio-degradable confetti.

So back to what WE'RE doing. Without the change of location, our guests will likely perform the toss as we walk back down the aisle as husband and wife. This means whatever they toss will bounce off of us and land on the newly refinished wood floor in the historical landmark that is our venue--and of course will need to be picked up before our dancing begins. So, confetti was out (scratches the floor), petals would have worked, but they'd likely get crushed under foot and be a little difficult to clean up. 

My solution? Yarn pom-poms! Think I'm nuts? I think it's perfect, myself. It allows me to incorporate my love of knitting, will be much nicer than being pelted by hard seeds ( I can just imagine them going down the front and back of my dress.) and will just look really cool. Don't believe me. Here, let me help you picture it. Look at my inspiration for the whole thing:

How sweet is that! Source

I've started making my own with yarn I had in my stash and have solicited some local friends to help me amass the large amount I need. We're going to get started on this in early March. That gives us almost three months before the big day.

I'm thinking everyone needs at least three (a nice little handful). Multiply that by 150 guest . . . .150 x 3 = 450 little fluffy pom-poms. I think we'll stick to purples, blacks and golds. Wish us luck!

Did you (or are you planning to) incorporate your crafty talents into your wedding planning? Did you start early enough to avoid a rush of DIY projects the week of your wedding?

January blizzards, May flowers?

Yesterday, I worked from home because we had yet another snow storm here in Iowa (and 52 cars in the ditch on my route to work convinced me that was a very smart move). On this cold inhospitable day, my florist or "flower lady," as I like to call her, e-mailed me to shore up the details of our wedding flowers!

So, since I haven't shared these with you yet, let me open with my inspiration photos for our wedding color scheme:

This first picture with the black cocktail dresses and the dark purple tulips. Don't those tulips look so lux?!

And then the combo of purple and white flowers in the second photo has me sold on my second flower color.

Tulips will be the main flower in our wedding, but I love peonies too much to ignore them on my big day. (My sister featured pink and fushia peonies in her wedding and it was gorgeous!) I'm putting my own spin on them and using white peonies to keep in my color scheme. In fact, I'll likely call on my aunts and grandmas gardens to provide some of these beauties.

My bouquet: I want something like this picture only with all purple tulips. I’ve got something in mind for a ribbon on this bouquet. If it doesn’t pan out, a shimmery gold ribbon would be fine.

Bridesmaid bouquets: I’m picturing these with white tulips and purple filler. They can be much less structured than mine (no banana leaves), and the gold ribbon will work with them also.

Altar arrangements: These can be similar to the bridesmaid dresses. I’ll leave the design up to my florist to somehow incorporate all of the wedding flowers from the purple tulips and filler to the white peonies and tulips.

Cake flowers: We’re actually having several round cakes as more of a desert buffet, and a mini two-tier cake for us to cut. The mini-cake will be 8” on the bottom and 6” on the top. I’m picturing purple and white tulips on top and maybe a few blooms on the sides like this picture.

DIY Centerpieces: I’m planning to types of centerpieces to be placed on alternating round tables. Since we last spoke I’ve been busy collecting vintage vases and pedestal candy dishes (see pics).

Centerpiece #1: I’m picturing two purple tulips and one white one in all of my tall arrangements very simply placed in my vases.

Centerpiece #2: My low arrangements are going to be white peony heads floating in the candy dishes. We’ll need about 10 of these as well.

I have 20 vases or candy dishes now and will likely pick up a few more before the wedding, so I don’t think I’ll need to rent any vases.I think this should be simple enough for my wedding party/family to do as long as my flower lady delivers the flowers. Does this seem practical?

I'm very excited about all of this, and can't wait to see it all come together. But I'm trying hard to make it super simple so we can just plunk these down on the tables the morning of the wedding and be golden!