Wedding Blog

I’ve gotten several emails asking about the hanging pomanders at our ceremony. I was waiting to write this post after my pro pics recap, but some gals are peeking at my teaser pictures!

A while back I priced out fresh carnation pomanders to be hung at our ceremony. Let’s just say it would cost more than the rest of our flowers combined to have them. Floral foam balls are insanely expensive, and pomanders require a lot of labor in a short amount of time should you want them fresh. That’s probably why, unless under an unlimited budget, you most often see fresh pomanders being fairly small. I wanted two 24″ pomanders and two 18″ ones, so I decided to go the paper flower route.

Idiot.

This was a really labor intensive project that made a very minimal impact. Our execution of it was so last-minute that we would have been better off just doing without them, or, at the least, building a nicer stand for the balls. But, at the right angle, they’re pretty!

But through the eyes of ceremony goers, not just a nice camera angle? Engh.

A little like funny, droopy balls floating in space. Furthermore, my good friend Jenny, our officiant, my dad AND my FIL all had to spend a good hour setting it all up! I think our biggest mistake was not gussying up the stand from which the balls hung from. With a little more imagination, and perhaps a couple flower garland cris-crosses, I think this project would have been really stunning!

So if you’re still interested in the how-to, here it is!

Follow these instructions to make tissue flowers. I estimated that each large lantern used about 200-300 flowers? Yes, that’s right. 200-300. Yikes. The bigger you make them, the less work it is, but I think they look great if you cut the tissue paper right around 4.5 inches wide, which is fairly small. I purchased the tissue paper from a bulk party supply store near my house. Party supply stores have the best selection of colors, so check there before you check a craft store like Michael’s, who seem to only carry primary colors. One warning: I made pink ones at first. They looked hideously fake. Ivory looks really great if you’re going for a “natural” look.

I followed Kenzie Kate’s instructions to hot glue gun the flowers to the lanterns. I bought 4 lanterns from the Paper Lantern Store. Resist the urge to buy colored lanterns if they are on sale…inevitably, some of the lantern peeks through the flowers.

I didn’t really think about how we were going to hang them until it was too late to do anything fancy. Mr. Penguin and I hit the stores and bought the following:

From Home Depot:

• Fence post concrete (1.5 bags per bucket), $2 each
• 4 wooden posts, 12 feet high, $10 each
• Wire cable, $5

From Ikea

• 4 Galvanized buckets, $7 each

Mr. Penguin mixed up the concrete in a wheelbarrow:

Dumped it in the buckets with the posts:

Then we tied the posts vertically to the side of my parents’ house with bungee cord to let them dry.

Its a really cheap project but be forewarned, especially when you buy really big lanterns like that, the project takes FOREVER. I would say it took me a good 15 hours per ball from start to finish, so it took me months! It helps to get some friends to help you out. My family made a big push at the end of the week to finish them with me, and that helped tremendously. But if you pace yourself, it’s rewarding and the actual balls are really beautiful! Perhaps you could come up with a better way of hanging them, or even just make small ones to hang on the sides of chairs, or on shepherd’s hooks. These were really difficult to transport to the winery, and on top of that, ate up four people’s precious time before the ceremony.

But not all was for naught…I am going to install light bulbs in three of them and use them as ambient lighting on the floor in our house. Yay for reuse!

Two last pictures for the pretty/not-so-pretty contrast…

YAY!

NEIGH!

Well, you can’t win ’em all!