Mini-post: pompoms

We visited our friend Katie last week and brought along some help, and made a million pompoms. I'm only exaggerating slightly.

Katie works at The Candy Store, the same place that's providing us with our candy buffet for the reception. We love the Candy Store, and we especially love Katie; she is the most enthusiastic candy lover we have ever met, and she also loves Jane Austen, making her my immediate friend. Katie offered to teach us how to make tissue paper pompoms for the wedding, and months ago, we agreed. We then put off doing it 'til the last month so that we'd be able to store forty of these fluffy suckers in our art-room-turned-wedding-lair, thinking these things would be puffed up and filling the apartment like a new species of Tribbles. We did not realize that the pompoms would actually stay folded up until their arrival at the wedding venue, however, so I shake my head a little at our silliness. Regardless, the timing worked great, and the evening provided another opportunity to unwind while still being productive.

Tissue pompoms are deceptively pretty for being so easy to make. Katie showed Brian, Sir Tam, our friend Jo, and myself how to fold the tissue paper like a giant fan, cut the ends into curves or points, and tie a twist tie 'round the middle. Fluffing is then done by spreading apart the layers into two fans (see Brian's tie) and then separating out each little layer until the whole thing looks like a dahlia. On this crafting evening, however, our job was simply to fold, cut, and tie...all fluffing, like I said, is done on-site. Well, apparently my over-stressed brain just couldn't grasp that, and I kept fluffing the damn things open. After the fourth or fifth one, people started shouting at me and I'd hastily put the pompom down, often half-fluffed, bewildered with myself for not being able to follow the simple instructions. So at the end of the night, we had a giant bag full of neatly flat-folded pompoms waiting for our wedding...and about a half-dozen dahlia-esque fluffed poms that I'd accidentally made while on autopilot. Let's be fair, though, people: I've been so distracted lately that I forgot to put conditioner in my hair the other morning (even though I've followed the exact same shower routine for ten years), and almost put toothpaste in my hair instead of hair wax. Making a few pompoms is less ridiculous than toothpaste head.

Everyone had a great time, and James--Katie's hubby and all around cool guy--took photos, and even gave us three albums' worth of music from his band, Reverb Syndicate, to play during our reception. This is wonderful because good surf music can be hard to come by. (If anyone wants an easy wedding gift, I'd love hardcopies of Reverb's three CD's. Just sayin.)

We ate cupcakes, folded and folded, and ended up with twice the intended number of poms at the end. This is one of those little moments where I indulge in the happy thought that someone else will have to fluff these while I'm off getting dressed that day. Sorry, decorating crew! Thanks again, Katie, for a super fun evening and for providing us paper and your genius for the craft! We're certain the poms will be the highlight of our decor.

Mini post: centrepieces, postal strike, and a chance for golfing!

Here’s the first of our mini-blogs…

Okay, first off: our friends at Boston Pizza Orleans are hosting a charity golf tournament. It's happening on September 6th, at the Grey Hawk Golf Course (Ottawa area). A foursome is $450 and there's only a couple spaces left! Your registration fee gets you the range, a powercart, dinner, and awards at Boston Pizza afterwards, with proceeds going to the Orleans YMCA/YWCA. But if playing golf isn't your thing, and you're a business owner, you can sponsor a hole for $75.00 and have your name on the course! Contact scottl@bostonpizza.com for info on foursomes and/or sponsorship. Boston Pizza Orleans has raised over $11,000 to date for the Y, so support this great charity venture!

We made centrepieces all this past weekend. I want to sound excited, and halfway through I was; but by the end of the weekend, if I never saw another tin can again, it would be too soon. Regardless, I think the finished product is pretty cool. We’re going to have three types of centrepiece:

 

There's more rosettes on the finished ones.

8 tables will have these unique bottles holding branches and feathers; the branches are decorated with the wool rosettes that Annie Bananie taught us how to make! Under all of the 25 centrepieces (25 tables, yyyyyyep), we will place a different cool sheet of cardstock paper…we have lots left over from Brian’s mom crafting our invites. The branches we gathered and the bottles were donated by a local person on a freecycle group, and the feathers were extras sent along by Angela Klassen when she made our aisle markers…so these centrepieces are 100% FREE.

6 tables will have these nifty clocks. I got these clocks about a year ago when a nearby house was being torn down and someone had pitched oodles of old clock parts on the street corner. I found these six lovely broken clocks, and they look great with a few rosettes and another sheet of decorative cardstock. Again: totally FREE!

And 11 tables will have these tin can arrangements. The cans have been gathered by blog readers, and from our own meals. The feathers are transferred from the aisle markers, and the candles that will reside in the remaining two cans (3 cans total per table) are from a giant pack of 100 that I got from Ikea. The ribbon for all the cans cost $3.00 total; the buttons came from my stash of craft stuff. The saucers were again donated by a freecycler, and this makes all 11 centrepieces a whopping $3.00 creation!

In other news, we’ve been really struggling with our guest list and RSVP’s. There was a postal strike here in Canada for about a week in June, and it has wreaked havoc on the mail. A friend just received an invite yesterday from us that was mailed in May. So we’re having to do a lot of follow ups to find out where people’s RSVP’s are, and see if they know they’re even invited. This slows things down, too, as we have people we’re happy to invite, if we know there’s a seat vacant…but when we don’t know, we can’t invite ‘new’ people. This has been one of those face-mashing sort of ordeals that just sucks.

We had a nice break, though, when we took a dance lesson from our friend Jo on Sunday. Jo is a champion dancer, and she taught us quite a lot of swing dance moves in the space of a couple hours. By the end of the session, my legs were aching and I was dizzy from all the turns. But she’s a great teacher, we had a really fun time, and there are apparently free-or-cheap lessons all over town, so we’ll be trying to get out to some more before the wedding…and I can see this becoming our ‘date night’ activity after the wedding, too! Jo also gave us a sneak peek at the wishing well she’s building for us to borrow for the wedding…the wishing well is where people can put gifts in envelopes that keeps them all safe, and it’s a play on the idea of ‘wishing us well’. Jo is an accomplished carpenter and the well is going to be amazing. She even made a table top for it, so when she has it at home between weddings (she’ll keep loaning it out for years to come), she can use it as a table. Amazing!

That roguish grin, as he works on his vows!

We also sat down to work on our vows. We haven't got them quite finished yet, which is stressing me out in exactly the same way I used to stress about falling behind in English class in high school. But it was a very emotional activity, and we both found it really moving to hear what the other one came up with. I'll admit: I shed a few tears right in the middle of Starbucks. I really think we're going to have a beautiful ceremony. 

Other than that, we’re trekking along. We took time out last night to hang out with Sir Tam and her hubby, and had a few glasses of wine. It was absolutely wonderful to unwind a bit, and I felt ready to tackle tasks again today!

We’ll write again soon! 27 days to go…well, 26 days and 2 hours!