On Saturday we celebrated the wedding of my younger brother, David, to his longtime girlfriend, Diana. It was a beautiful ceremony, filled with Diana's homemade touches and both D and D's personalities. My older brother, Bill, officiated and the ceremony was personal, touching and funny. What a special day! More on that later...
In the spring, Diana's bridesmaids and I threw a vintage Parisian themed bridal shower for her. We went back and forth on the theme, but since D and D got engaged in Paris, we decided on that for our theme. Here is a link to our Pinterest page, which provided our inspiration:
http://pinterest.com/mellowlane/d-s-shower/
We started by deciding on our invitations. We found these hot air balloon invitations on Etsy and fell in love with them. We debated about having them be a bit more Parisian, but we loved the hot air balloon and decided it was travel-inspired and fit our theme well enough.
http://www.etsy.com/listing/84853996/vintage-feel-hot-air-balloon-bridal?ref=sr_gallery_17&ga_search_query=invitations+love+is+in+the+air&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_ship_to=US&ga_search_type=handmade
Kelly, the owner of the Etsy shop worked with us to create the format and wording we wanted and then emailed us the JPEG to print out ourselves. It seemed a little flimsy, so we mounted them on two colors of paper. Here is what we ended up with:
Sorry for the weird crop. Didn't want my mom's address out there. And now can we all just take a moment there and acknowledge the fact that I just uploaded a picture to my blog!! Yea me!!! My heart is still doing palpitations. That was pretty exciting. I feel like I've actually accomplished something today. Wow.
The girls and I were on a pretty tight budget, so we tried to go as inexpensive as possible. We had the party at two in the afternoon, so we did not serve a full lunch. We did French munchies and desserts. We did three French cheeses, purchased at Trader Joe's, fruit and two different crepes.
Dude! Two pictures! I'm blowing my own mind right now. Our big food splurge was on French pastries.
I borrowed these cake stands from my friend Michelle. She usually weaves a ribbon through the holes, but she suggested twine to go with our vintagey kind of feel. It was perfect since I was using twine around the flower "vases." (I'll show those in a minute.)
We also had a yummy mimosa bar, which was super fun! I went to three different stores to find bottles to hold juice. (I should also mention that I purchased bottles from all three stores, only to return the ones I didn't want. It became an obsession. It's not good. I got these from Ross. They have similar ones at Ikea, but they are more expensive.)
In looking at Pinterest, we found the idea of a "make your own perfume bar." We loved this idea, thought it would work for different ages, and would be both an activity and a favor. There are lots of different options out there, in different price ranges.
We used inexpensive maps from AAA as a tablecloth in case there were any spills. And this table was a high, cocktail table, so people could stand to make their own perfumes. Each guest had a bag stamped with an Eiffel Tower and "merci" and a tag with their name, also stamped with a French stamp.
For decorations, I sent out an email to a bunch of my friends and they brought over anything Parisian that they had laying around the house. We used them all over. Here's the backdrop to our food table. (The food table, by the way, is my mom's ping pong table, with half left folded up. It makes for an awesome buffet table.
My parent's neighbor flies the French flag every year on Bastille Day, so we happily snatched that up.
We also printed out a bunch of engagement photos of D and D as well as pictures that Diana took on their trip to Paris. We hung them up using twine and clothespins. (Actually my dad pinned them up. Yea Dad!)
Most of our decoration budget and time was spent on flowers. We went to the Los Angeles flower mart the day before to buy flowers. I already had these metal containers, which I've used as planters. Some things I replanted. Some of the containers were already empty. Upon emptying them out, I discovered that we had drilled holes in the bottoms to let water flow out, which of course is so not convenient for cut flowers. We ended up putting different sized Tupperware containers in the bottom of the containers to hold the water. The idea was that this would look like a French flower market. We were pretty happy with the results, and buying larger, less expensive flowers in bunches saved us a lot of money.
We also needed flowers for the tables. I found a whole bunch of vintage French labels from The Graphics Fairy and they inspired the table arrangements. Here's a link to one of those, but there are tons of others, too.
http://graphicsfairy.blogspot.com/2011/05/vintage-graphic-image-round-french-soap.html
I took my empty jars, in different sizes, which I use all the time for holding nuts, trail mix, raisins, chocolate chips, etc. I had already removed their original labels. (Sometimes it takes a little nail polish remover or rubbing alcohol to get all the glue off.) Then I printed the labels in different sizes for the different jars. I attached them with homemade Mod Podge. I found the recipe for that here:
http://doityourselfdivas.blogspot.com/2011/09/diy-mod-podge.html
Then we tied each one with twine and filled them with flowers. We placed three at each table in varying heights. I think they looked gorgeous and were a huge hit. AND, other than the flowers, they were practically free. I had all the materials already.
We also used one type of flower per jar. Flower arranging is not my strength and I find that grouping flowers by type eliminates some of that problem.
It was a great day, filled with yummy treats, beautiful flowers, old and new friends and, most importantly, a lot of love for Diana.
Going to hit publish now. Cross your fingers that this actually works. If not, my computer may get thrown across the room.
