Wedding Blog

A couple months ago my venue caught fire.

It’s mostly OK - the fire was very minor and only a mantle was burned (a 100-year-old mantle, but still…it could have been worse). As a result, the owner (quite rightly!) no longer allows open flame, unless it’s floating in water (limiting us to floating tealights, and pretty much nothing else). Which is OK–I can certainly understand her reasons–but it sort of sucks for me. My centerpieces, buffet tables, everything is going to have to be redone. I can’t use my pretty silver candelabras, and I’ll lose the romantic candlelit look I was so hoping for.

So I’ve started researching online, and have come up with a few solutions.

I bought some LED tealights ($6.99 for 6 at Michaels) to use in my luminaries out front. But they’re too expensive for me to use all over, and they’re not very pretty–so I wouldn’t want to display them anyway.

Fire is still allowed in the ballroom’s fireplace, and the owner bought a *huge* votive holder arrangement to set inside… (this isn’t the exact one, but it’s rather similar)

I’m going to shift the focal point of the ballroom to the fireplace: add extra decorations and twinkle lights to the mantle, move the DJ farther away, etc. Hopefully guests won’t even notice that this may be the only open flame in the place ;).

I’m also going to have to re-work my centerpieces. I’d really like to incorporate the candles somehow, but I’m not sure how. Here are a couple of crude MS Paint renditions of my ideas.

What I was envisioning before (the light blue box is a mirror, the yellow circles are tealights, and the tan stuff exploding out the top of the gray vase (which will actually be clear) is my tissue paper flowers. The dots scattered around are confetti, and the dark blue line is the runner.

But that won’t work, because the tealights are floating. And I’m really really attached to the flowers, so it’s not just a matter of leaving them out and sticking the tealights in different-shaped vases. I want them both!

My venue has some vases that look sort of like this (they provide us w/ whatever vases, mirrors, etc. we want) :

And I was thinking I could fill it up with water, float the tealights in it, and then *stack* (using a taper holder as a rise) another vase on top , which could hold my flowers.

The whole contraption would look something like this:

The squished thing at the bottom is my flattish-vase, filled with water, with tealights floating within. Then the Y-shaped thing in the middle of it would be the taper holder I’m using to elevate the other vase (which is the blob with the off-white “flowers” coming out). I’ll still use my runner and confetti, too. I think.

I’m just trying to figure out if it looks stupid or not, or if there’s anything else I can try *without buying anything* (I’m outta $$$, kids).