Identifying the Yummies

After this wedding, I'm pretty sure I'll never want to create any sort of signage/labels/tags ever again.  Because let me tell ya, our guests are going to be the most fully-informed, non-confused, wedding guests ever.  As things have gotten down to the wire we decided to nix a few of the signs on our list because, in all of our wedding brain craziness, we came to our senses and realized our guests could probably figure some stuff out on their own (like, say, where the bathrooms are or how in the world to navigate the fifteen feet between the elevators and the ceremony space).

There were some signs that were always non-negotiable for us though, and those were the ones that were meant to be functional while also adding some crucial design flare (and, let's be honest here, that would make for some incredibly cool detail shots).  Labels for the dessert buffet and the candy buffet definitely fell into that category.

As is probably true with all good design, these little devils look much more beautifully simplistic than they actually were to create.  We're so proud of how they turned out, though, and are immensely relived that they're finished.  So relieved, in fact, that I forgot to take pictures of the dessert buffet tags before we packed them away, which means you'll just have to wait for the pro pics to come back to see how those turned out.  

But... here are some pics I did take during the process of attaching the candy buffet labels to our jars.  (And in true Ferris Wheel fashion, the ribbon I used for this has been discontinued and I ran out halfway through the job.  So cross your fingers that our feverish internet search actually yields the right replacement ribbon!)

Now, on to the pictures!

 Any chance that you'll be over-informing the guests at your wedding?  And admit it - you like pretty signs too, right?

Photobooth Speech Bubbles, Minus the Chalk

I am so flippin' excited that we're going to have a photobooth at our wedding!  And yeah, I know it's one of those things that's been done everywhere at this point, but I honestly don't care about that in the slightest.  The idea of giving our guests a fun, non-dancing activity during our reception is totally worth it to me.  (Not that we don't want people to dance, of course.  We just want them to have options.)  Our photobooth package includes a box of props, which is great because it means we don't have to raid the Halloween stores on Nov. 1 to find our own (although that did sound kinda fun).  But we still wanted to find a way to personalize things just a bit.  

I'd seen pictures of those awesome chalkboard speech bubbles, and I thought that might be our answer.  But when I talked to Mr. FW about it he seemed concerned.  It's not that he thought it was a bad idea, no no.  He just thought it would make me freak out to be near chalkboards on our wedding day.  See...  I have a bit of a chalk phobia.  For realz, just typing out the word chalk makes me shiver.  I can't stand anything about it - the way it feels in your hand, the way it sounds when you're writing with it, the dust it creates when you erase it.  Ugh...  seriously, it's a problem.  

So Mr. FW went searching for alternatives, and he discovered the ingeniousness of white board contact paper.  Yep, it's contact paper that you can write on with dry erase markers.   You can probably purchase it a lot of places, but we're online people so we bought ours on Amazon.

{GoWrite dry erase rolls on Amazon.com, $8.99}

Mr. FW banged out two bubbles in just a few hours, and each step was pretty simple.  Here's a little tutorial we put together for you.

We have a lot of cardbox boxes around the house lately, so Mr. FW cut up a few of those to use as the backing for our bubbles.  He sketched out both a speech bubble and a thought bubble then he got to cutting.

First he cut out the bubbles, then he used those as templates to cut out the whiteboard paper.  A little note here: We found out the hard way that the contact paper isn't super thick, so we could see the writing on the cardboard through the paper.  Mr. FW said that if he was doing it over again he'd also cut out a single piece of printer paper to attach first to the cardboard, under the contact paper.

To give them just a little extra oomph, I inked on a simple blue border with a Sharpie marker.

Mr. FW attached some paint stir sticks (is that what those are called?) to the back, and then they were finished!  We haven't tested them yet with the dry erase markers, but I feel pretty certain they're going to be fine because all the reviews of this contact paper were very complimentary.  Just in case, though, we're packing up a small spray bottle of cleaner and napkins.  Now I just can't wait to see what how creative our guests will be with these!

Any other chalk phobes out there?  Also, I can imagine a lot of other uses for these little bubbles besides a photobooth.  What would you use them for?

Our At-Home Cake Tasting

One thing people frequently told us after we got engaged was that the only perk of wedding planning is the free cake tastings.  Personally, I think there have actually been a lot of perks (like, for instance, blogging for all of you!).  But I do love me some cake, so I was looking forward to that perk in particular.  There was a wrench in that plan, though.  We wanted to save money in the wedding cake department, which is why we opted to go with a dessert buffet rather than a traditional multi-tiered wedding cake.  We wanted the center cake on the display to be a small, "top tier"-esque cake.  Just enough so that we could have the fancy wedding cake experience without actually having a full-on multi-tier cake.

{like one of these side cakes}

cake by Cater It Simple, image via the Cater It Simple Flickr page

cake by For the Love of Cake; image via their Flickr page

Well what we found out is that when you want to have a really small, really cheap fancy wedding cake then places don't readily offer free tastings.  We considered skipping the tasting experience altogether, but we just couldn't shake the feeling that $100 was still a lot of money to spend on a cake that we'd have no idea what it was going to taste like.

Luckily, after many an email, we found a woman who offered to prepare a $12 "tasting box" for us that we could try on our own prior to ordering with her.  And that, my friends, is how we ended up doing our cake tasting on our living room couch.

As you can tell from the picture, we were so excited to dig in that we were halfway through with the flavors before I remembered to pull out my camera. In case you were curious our flavor options were red velvet, salted caramel and toffee, citrus, vanilla and fresh strawberries, devil's food with mocha, chocolate with coconut and ganache, and chocolate with rasberry jam and fudge.

I'm so very glad that we got to do this tasting because we ended up with a flavor that we never would've chosen otherwise.  If we'd had to pick off a list, I would've preferred to go with something safe that I could be sure we'd both like.  Maybe the vanilla and fresh strawberries, because anything more exotic would have been too big a risk.  But because we got to do our at-home tasting, we learned that the unusual-sounding salted caramel with toffee is delicious!  I absolutely cannot wait to see how our little skyline cake will turn out, and how it will look surrounded by all of our other desserts and topped with our custom cake topper (which I will totally show you once I have it).

Moral of the story: if something is important to you (like a tasting), don't be afraid to keep asking (politely, of course) if you're not initially able to find what you're looking for.  Hopefully it will only take you a few tries before someone says yes.

Has there been anything you've had to ask for because it wasn't offered at first?  Were you eventually successful?

When Procrastination Pays Off

For over a year now now Mr. FW and I have talked about having a photobooth at our wedding.  First we considered DIYing it like so many fabulous bees before me have done.   Seriously, if you are considering going that route, check out those tutorials for a near-exhaustive rundown of all the various ways you can DIY a photobooth.  With so much information out there, I was sure this was a project we could take on.  Then, the days and months kept ticking by and the the list of projects kept mounting, so that finally at some point we decided we better look into the cost of hiring someone to make our photobooth dream come true.

But having seen so many DIY photobooths in blogland, I was dead set on avoiding the old-school photobooth that could only seat a few people on a bench.  Instead I wanted a massive booth that would easily hold a whole group of people.

{like Hot Wings and her crew}

image by Eric Dos Santos via Weddingbee

{also Coconut and her crew}

image by Jason Angelini via Weddingbee

Unfortunately, those booths generally come with a pretty high price tag - probably because they're operated by actual photographers rather than remote controls.  Completely understandable.  But still multiple hundred dollars over what we'd allocated in our budget.  So... having seen those price tags, we procrastinated some more.  We still really wanted a photobooth, but we were starting to think we wouldn't be able to afford one.

We literally had not talked about the photobooth dilemma for the last month.  Then, out of the blue on Friday morning we both received an email from Amazon Local Deals (which I assume is a new Groupon-type service that Amazon is offering).  It was for a photobooth company offering a package that had *everything* we were looking for, all for hundreds less than our budgeted amount.  They might not be able to squeeze fifteen full-bodied people into a frame, but they can handle a group and that's good with me.  We called them right away to be sure they were available on our wedding date, and they were!  So you better believe we purchased that deal with lightning speed and then immediately confirmed our date with them.

image via Bridal Expo Chicao

We have a photobooth!  That we can afford!  That will be almost the only thing at our reception we won't have to build, store, and set-up ourselves!  That was handsdown the easiest, least stressful decision we've made in months!  I know I shouldn't be an advocate of procrastination because, as a procrastinator, I am well-aware of the adverse consequences.  But just this once, it totally paid off.

Don't you just love when things are easy?!  Have any of your wedding decisions unexpectedly fallen in your lap?

Buffet of My Dreams

One day last summer as I was innocently shopping at Target, I rounded a corner, the heavens opened and a ray of light shone down on this:

Do I spy with my little eye an aisle full of cobalt blue, black, and white plates in multiple patterns?!  Plates that, with just a little tweaking, would make perfect cake/dessert stands for our dessert buffet?  The retail gods had dropped our wedding into Aisle 10 just in time for me to stumble upon it, and it was a miracle! I quickly snapped some pictures of various ways we could use these affordable melamine beauties.

A few days later I went back with Mr. FW and we created a little mock-up, right there in the aisle.

We found that by stacking patterned plates on top of bowls, cups, storage containers, and other plates we could achieve a cohesive, multi-level look for very little cost.  How little?  Well, we got all the components for twelve stands and four additional serving plates for only $75. Score!

A few months later we finally dragged all of those components out of storage so that we could mock-up the dessert buffet and finalize our dessert selections.  Once we had decided which plates should go with which bases, we made those combos permanent with the help of a little E6000. 

Mr. FW preferred a more random look, but the meticulous part(s) of me just couldn't handle it. I *love* symmetry, so I just HAD to evenly arrange the designs of the top plates. I did throw him a teensy bone by mixing up the black/white bases somewhat, and even that just about stretched me to the limit! 

Sixteen stands = sixteen desserts.  Mmmm....   I so can't wait for this wedding!  Now the only question is how to acquire all of those desserts. I could bake them myself, delegate some of the baking responsibility to other people, buy them, or do some combination of all those. Whatever way we go, I still can't fathom how all of this stuff will get from our house to our venue. We're talking boxes and boxes of stuff plus a boatload of desserts.  Ugh... I'll think about that another time. For now, only happy thoughts about sixteen dessert options!

What desserts would you choose if you were going to create a dessert buffet? Would you try to please everyone, or just pick your favorites?

We Are Ballers... String Ballers

My mom was kind enough to visit us recently to lend her wedding elf services.  (Thanks, Mom!)  Little did she know she'd be spending her time out here developing an intimate relationship with balls.  We're talking large balls, small balls, fragile balls, scattered balls, stacked balls, and everyone's favorite - flaky balls.  Oh yeah, we were ballin' out of control, and I'm just dying to show you what we accomplished. 

I'm so proud, and so relieved, to to say that this box contains 136 small, black and white string balls. Tutorials for these things are all over the internet, but I'll add my two cents as well.  And if you want to see our mock-up of how we plan to use these beauties, just scroll straight to the bottom of this post.  I won't be upset.  :-)

The materials were incredibly cheap given the visual impact they'll make, but it is a project that requires a lot of time and patience.  We started with a box full of small ballons, Stiffy fabric stiffener, size 3 crochet thread, and a glass bowl to hold the fabric stiffener.  We experimented with embroidery floss because it's cheap and comes in so many colors, but the resulting ball didn't hold it's shape.  And if I had it all to do over again I would get white or clear balloons because sometimes the balloon color rubbed off on the white string. 

We learned the hard way that the trick to getting nice, clean string balls that aren't full of glue flakes is to DILUTE the fabric stiffener with a bit of water before you start.  I can't stress this enough, and I promise you will thank me for sharing this with you.  Even just a little bit of water makes a huge difference.  I also suggest 'rounding' your balloons before you get started so your string balls look less balloon-like.  Soak your thread in the fabric stiffener mixture and then 'squeeze' out the excess before placing the string on your balloon.  I found it easier to soak and squeeze a long length of string at a time so that I could wrap more continuously, but you don't want to do too much at once because the string will knot and the glue will start to dry. 

Some tutorials suggest tying the string onto the balloon before you start wrapping, but we found that made it much more difficult to remove the balloon after the string dried.  So we just laid the string on the balloon and then wrapped it a few times to stabilize the end of the thread. 

By the time I'd made a couple dozen of these, I had developed a wrapping system that was faster and resulted in a rounder shape.  It's hard to explain, but imagine your balloon is a globe and the balloon knot is at the North Pole.  I started wrapping my string 3-4 times around the 'equator,' then I wrapped it from the North to South pole and pulled the string tightly, which pushes out the air in the middle of the balloon.  You'll be able to see it getting rounder.  To hold that shape, continue wrapping from north to south all around the balloon.  The outcome looks a bit like a pumpkin with vertical lines going all the way around. 

Once that shape is formed, you can wrap string to your little heart's content until you're happy with the look.  Cut the string and then loop the end twice under another string on the balloon.  This will keep it from unwrapping and/or becoming loose while it's drying.  To string them up, we poked a paper clip through the knot and hung it on a line running through our house.  They're so pretty this way, you might not want to pop them!

Give them 24 hours to dry, then pop the balloons with a straight pin.  Some of them will deflate right away, and some will slowly unstick themselves from the string over the course of a few minutes.  Hopefully you'll then have a perfectly formed string ball with no unsightly flakes.

Here were our final stats:   We were able to get about thirty 3-4" balls per bottle of fabric stiffener and twelve small balls (or three large 8-10" balls) per spool of thread.  Once we had a routine going, each of us were able to make about ten small balls per hour or three large balls per hour.  Total cost of all centerpieces for twelve 8-foot tables (including string, fabric stiffener, balloons, hurricane vases, and tealight candles) is $202.47 or $16.87 per table.  Not too shabby!

If you made it this far, then I'll reward you with a picture of our centerpiece mock-up.  The only thing we have in our house that's eight feet long (like our reception tables) is our window seat, so you'll have to forgive the bright back-lighting.  Imagine this with a very light gray tablecloth, sapphire blue tealight candles in the votives, and a hurricane vase that's just a smidge taller.  If you've got all that in your mind, then you're picturing our centerpieces!

Love.  LOVE!  Oh, how I adore seeing it all come together like this!  It's so satisfying to know that all of our hard work is paying off - both in dollars and in aesthetics.  *happy sigh*

What wedding project has been particularly rewarding for you?