Obesess much?

I saw the coolest picture on wedding bee a few weeks ago. This bride had made tissue paper pomanders to spruce up the décor at her wedding several months before I started reading Wedding Bee, and was asking what to do with wedding stuff like that after the wedding. In her post, she included pics of the pomanders, and I fell in love with them. And I don’t mean just a little bit, but the whole way off the deep end.

For about a week all that I could think about were those pomanders and how to make them and what I would make them out of, how I would hang them, how they would look at my venue, what colors of tissue paper that I would use…are you getting the point that I was a LITTLE obsessed? Or maybe you would (correctly) say that I was obsessed MUCH? Yeah, I admit it. I’m proud of it even.

It’s really all that I could think of. I had thought of using colored Japanese lanterns, but the thought of trying to match paper lanterns to the colors in my head, much less that meant that I would have to CHOOSE colors…it was just too much. But flower pomanders were gorgeous, and when hung from above, I could not tell in the picture that these were not real flowers.
I started pricing flowers online that week too, so this could have been some of the obsession factor!

Anyway, once I showed the picture to a few different people and made up my mind that I would have something like that at my ceremony site, I set about finding out how to make them. I re-read the post that had started it all, and I followed her links to her other posts about constructing the pomanders. Then I also went searching on the internet and found several tutorials, even a few video tutorials on utube.com that helped. Martha Stewart (god love her) also had several methods to use and tips to try. After compiling them all, it was really bugging me one night as I was lying in bed about how real they would look. And if they didn’t look all that real, then would they look more real from further away, as in once they were hung high and all?

I got a little obsessed about it, and decided that I would make one right then and there. No matter that I was beat-assed tired. No matter that Mr. CC thought that I should just lay down and relax. No matter that I couldn’t find ONE SINGLE PIECE of tissue paper during my crazy 15 minute search of our closet. Didn’t matter that I didn’t actually HAVE any of those fuzzy pipe thingys that you use in arts and crafts as a kid. I would make do.

And I did. Make do, that is. I ended up making a glittered (yep, you read that right) tissue paper flower while in bed that night. I used a piece of a scrunchy Christmas bow to tie it off in place of the fuzzy thingy, and yes, white tissue paper with multi-colored glitter flakes was the ONLY piece of tissue paper that I could find. But it was all worth it when I saw the end result…

It was NOT beautiful.

But that was ok, because I could see enough to know that it was not pretty because of the glitter paper. And the poor folding job of mine. I could see past all of that to know that with the right paper and a little more trial and error on my part, I could make these look like flowers from afar. I could see it clearly in my mind how it would look at our ceremony site and I was hooked.

Has anyone else ever gotten an idea in their head and you’re just not sure that you can make it work for what you’re wanting to do? And then when all of the pieces come together and it work out, it’s just almost magical? That’s what these tissue paper flowers are like to me. They are magical. They are magical not because they’re so great, but they offered me a cheap (if a little labor intensive) project that can replace a very expensive piece of my budget. And they follow the theme that I’m working for – simple, elegant and romantic. They give me flowers without costing what flowers cost. I L-O-V-E them!

I am expecting the paper lanterns in the mail today. Once I can see how it’s all going to come together, I will do a post on the whole project step-by-step. Just in case anyone else out there is as crazy as I am! And then, you can love them just as much as I do! Well, maybe not THAT much…