The wedding projects

So this is the phase one of the wedding projects. As some of you know i wanted to make things for my wedding, not to save money perhaps but just to add that handmade touch and so all of my friends could help in the decoration process. So i knew that the main project needed to get started first because it was a big one...

Like this big!



We have referred to this as a ruffle ball. I got the inspiration from a picture i had seen in a magazine my grandma had. They had used a styrofoam ball to attache tea stained coffee filters to. So i tried one at home. Looked good but i needed it bigger. The chautauqua building is a big place so you can't just put a 6 inch ball in the center and call it good. So we started brain storming how to make it bigger because styrofoam balls don't come in that size! So through a calibration of brainstorming we came up with paper mâchéing a three foot ballon. That would give us the hard covering we needed to attach the coffee filters to. So that was a project in itself. We had to borrow an air compressor just to get the darn things blown up! We had to mix up the goop in a small trash can and rip up strips of newspaper. Then when we went to paper mache them it took three people and a dining room table to get started. One person to hold the balloon, one person to dip the newspaper in the goop and another person to slap it on there!

This is what it looked like dry.



So once those dried we had to have enough coffee filters to cover the monsters! I felt like i tea stained coffee filters for months! We made regular tea stained coffee filters and light pink coffee filters. It took hours to attach the coffee filters to the balloons. My friend Katy and i spent the ENTIRE super bowl attaching coffee filters to one balloon! I estimated we used around 1,000 coffee filters on each big balloon...



Not to mention we made small ones too. We probably had 11 or 12 small ones. All in all i estimated that we used 7,000 coffee filters. And.. i never want to see another coffee filter in my life! haha.





It took a couple months off and on to finish this project. We had sunday wedding craft day and the girls would come over and we'd work on these. Some like them more than others haha. Here is a finished pink one!




To put these up in the Chautauqua was quite a headache too... That story is for another time but i wanted to show you how they got up there and then how they looked as a finished project. This is Brett perfecting them. The three big ruffle balls hung in the center of the Chautauqua building.




We hung the smaller ones one the stage her is a little glimpse :)




i hope you enjoyed these ruffled balls! They were hard work but man was it worth it!