Weddingbee

When planning for our centerpieces, Ms. Mango and I decided it would be a good idea to incorporate some modern elements. More specifically, we didn’t want “cookie cutter” centerpieces, but at the same time, we didn’t want our guests wondering whether we were abstract artists that missed the mark.

After a great amount of discussion, we decided that half of the tables at our Nikkah reception would have fresh flower arrangements, while the other half would have something… different. Ms. Mango kind of gave me some freedom to decide what we should place on the latter half of the tables. So, I began to think of the many designs that stuck out to me during our wedding planning research.

One centerpiece idea that has always sparked an interest in me was crystal trees.

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I think they invoke a sense of elegance and modernity. However, our budget simply couldn’t accommodate 12 crystal trees. Between having to buy Manzanita trees and crystal beads, this project would have been way too expensive for us. So I set out to create crystal tree-like centerpieces.

The first step I took was to find a substitute for Manzanita trees. What I wanted was something to give the centerpiece structure, and to also create places to to hang a variety of pendant decorations.  What I found were natural birch branches. The natural birch branches seemed to be a good choice because they were all-natural, sturdy, and obviously… branched, so we could easily hang things off of them.

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They were really cost efficient. That was my main motivation for choosing this type of branche. Essentially, we would be creating crystal “bushes”, but hey, what the heck!

I ordered the branches and received them a week later in this fashion:

They were basically bundled up really tightly. The website I purchased our branches from had instructions on how to open the birch branches, so my cousin and I began opening each stem, one at a time, and placing them in our cylinder vases.

Honestly, this wasn’t as easy as the blog instructions had claimed it to be. Every time we began to pull the branches apart, we’d hear them crack and break right off. It took us a while before we figured out it would be a good idea to wet each branch at their joints before trying to adjust them.

After we opened up all the branches, we began placing them in vases, making sure to invoke some sort of symmetry.

Once we placed the right number of stems in each vase, we tied the bottoms of the stems with a thin metal wire. That proved to be a good move when we started transporting them around (sorry the pic is blurry).

The next step was to add crystals. Now, while I certainly agree that using Swarovski crystals would have been the best way to go, my wallet didn’t agree. So we turned to the best alternative that we could come up with, which was acrylic bead curtains.

Yes sir, the same cheapo teeny bopper dorm room accessory turned out to be a great material for getting the crystal bead effect. I found ours at shopwildthings.com.

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When they arrived, we received a huge curtain of acrylic beads that we cut to random sizes. The best thing about the curtain was that the beads were already strung up and they also shined nicely. A quick tip: make sure the beads you buy the are the ones that are faceted, otherwise they will look dull.

I don’t have any pictures of this step, but we basically cut about 20-30 pieces of various lengths for each crystal bush. I then took a staple and hooked one end right under the first bead on the string of beads, and twisted the end of the staple so that it served as a metal loop to hold the beads. The other end of the staple was then hooked to the branch.

When all 20-30 pieces of bead strings were attached to the branches, it began to look like this:

Not too shabby, eh? Well, I thought the branches needed a little color. I began searching for options to bring some color to the centerpieces, and remembered reading a post by Miss Cupcake, in which she had used paper flowers on a guest book memo board. So, I went to my local Michaels and picked up the following paper flowers:

I placed these flowers randomly on the branches. The best part about these flowers is that they already have a small hole in the middle of each flower, so it was easy to slip them on to branch itself, like this:

So, after the beads and flowers got a dab of craft cement, the semi-final product looked like this:

I say semi-final because I actually added individual base and clip lights to accent the centerpieces using materials from Dollar Tree (MacGyver it!), which I will reveal in the near future.

What do you think so far?