Summer Wedding

My cousin got married this summer and I was able to contribute to the festivities by planning their open house!! And boy was I in for an eye opener; weddings are a lot of work. My Aunt was so trusting, I am glad I did not give her a heart attack. I have never planned an open house before. It was good practice for me since I have 3 little girls. In about 20 years from now my husband and I are going to be wedding central, with my luck all my girls will get married at the same time.

 

We had an outdoor open house planned with fresh flowers, delicious desserts, tiki torches, soft twinkling lights strung in tree's; it was going to be awesome until it started to pour :(  I was feeling pretty frustrated that it was pouring rain in the middle of July, rain in July.... since when?!? Come on mother nature cut me a break. Well she didn't so we hustled and moved everything inside and made do with what space we had. It turned out really nice even though my original vision was crushed.

 

I would have to say the flowers were the hardest part, not to mention I didn't have a clue what I was doing. I have no floral experience what so ever. I knew that I wanted to use 3 mason jars as the vase. My Aunt and her daughter whipped out the cute burlap flowers, another inspiration from Pinterest. They used random sized pearls for the centers.

 

 After endless days of browsing online I had a general idea of what I wanted the fresh flowers to look like. Fresh flowers are tuff because you can't play around ahead of time and get an idea of what you want to use or how many stems you need. It's a guessing game. The morning of the open house I started arranging and after a few tries came up with this

 not bad huh!

 

 I really quite enjoyed it after I got the hang of it. Here is my happy row of flowers :) Well I guess the flowers weren't so happy but I sure was.

Don't they look awesome!

I knew I wanted to stamp the bride and grooms established date on the burlap table runners but was not quiet sure how I was going to pull that off. I asked my sister, the AMAZING graphics designer, to design something for me. She made me a stencil that I could re-use on all the table runners, pretty nifty. I love the personal touch that it gave to each table.

 

Here is a really crappy picture of the cool sign I made for the bride and groom, why did I not take a better picture?? I have been asking myself that same question for days now. It was a really fun sign to make. I used the paint and wax method. Where you rub candle wax on the area's that you don't want the paint to stick to, then you sand the paint off the waxed area's after the paint dries.

Let see what else can I show off.......

Sorry, here is another horrible picture, I hate taking pictures indoors.

These are the tissue paper flowers that we made to hang in the tree's, of course that was before mother nature had her way with the weather. So we found another use for them and tied them to the stair railing.

 

 

This is a picture of the dessert buffet.

My sister made the gourmet cheese cakes, they are to die for. We also served chocolate dipped strawberries, brownies, cream puffs and cake.

 

Here is the favor table. More cute burlap flowers, vanilla taffy's in brown paper bags tied with twine and lots of crystal candle sticks.

      

 

I had a little too much fun making signs with the bride and grooms names on them.

 

And there you have it, our summer open house!!