Weddingbee Blog

There are ups and downs to having a fiance who by trade is a designer. It’s awesome because there are SO many crazy benefits (have I ever mentioned that Mr. Ramen works for Xyron???). From cool materials, to a personal design-slave who can carry out my every wish in Illustrator and other design programs, to access to sweet tools like a laser cutter (which may be put into action)…. etc.

One of the downsides is that the man seriously has an opinion on evvvverything. This can be good, but sometimes he really gets stuck on one thing that he likes, and I just can’t fight him. Well, I usually end up caving in to him. But he has a good eye, and he’s a good sounding board for my crazy ideas. So, this works perfectly.

Anyways, from the beginning, I knew that I wanted some variance in our centerpieces. When you have ~35 tables to decorate, you get to expand your creativity. Back when we were thinking of working with a florist, we decided that our 18 “low” centerpieces would be simple.

Enter, the floating bowl.

Filled with water, rocks, some pretty blossoms, and a few floating candles. It’s cute, simple, chic, elegant… it has a touch of vintage, while still being modern. But, notice one minor detail: CANDLES!!!! Darn it, flammable artwork! So, we nixed this idea when florists began quoting us $30/table for this little sucker. And the fact that we couldn’t even use candles kind of killed the love affair. (But, can someone else PLEAAAAAAAAAAAASE do this and then email me the pictures? Thanks!)

When we were contemplating the whole “branch with lanterns” thing, we thought about incorporating table number lanterns into the low centerpieces as well (you know, to have a cohesive look). Something in the order of this:

We ran into some problems: it was a little TOO organic. We can’t have potted plant-type things (so no wheatgrass), and the bottles were a little too vintage/kitschy/cool for us. And, it didn’t really flow with the whole manzanita look.

So, I decided to reconsider submerged orchids. This is a look that has been really popular in weddings for quite some time, for good reasons: it’s pretty, it’s cheap, and… uh, yeah… it’s cheap. Ot was precisely the look that my designer fiance agreed would work into our modern-sexy-vintage-romance look… and it would mesh with the manzies nicely.

Once I stumbled upon this baby, it was all over. I knew this was EXACTLY what I wanted. We’ll put our own little spin on this trio. Our platform will be black and slightly bigger; the mid-sized vase is actually going to be frosted and filled with battery-operated tea lights (sighhhhh, oh the sacrifices!), and the smaller vase will contain one large cymbidium orchid (I think… unless we change our minds and go with all dendrobiums… which is possible). Oh - and the orchids will be white dendrobiums with a slight blush pink center. And again, no open flames. Sigh.

Oh yeahhhhh, can you feel the sexiness? I’m terribly excited, and will post our mock-ups of our centerpieces for you once we get all the materials together. So, there you have it - our completely evolved centerpiece species. Don’t worry - you can look forward to learning about how we decorate the manzies and did all of this ourselves… with a lot of help and love from some cousins.

Are you doing more than one type of centerpiece? Is anyone else frustrated with the look of those battery-operated tealights? Is there a particular brand you know of that looks more natural than the others?