Weddingbee Blog

When Mr. Crepe and I were starting to plan our wedding, I had thought that it wasn’t necessary to have a cake topper, especially since we weren’t going to have a traditional cake. But I realized that this was the perfect project for the mister because he has always liked sculpting characters out of clay and had done this a few times while we were in art school.

When I brought up the idea, he was pretty excited about this responsibility! He came up with the idea that he would make old people versions of us, which I thought was a very sweet and cute concept. So months later, we were on video chat and he showed me what he had worked on so far:

Yes.. I realize this is a decapitated head.

Do not be alarmed! I love the glasses detail and his Irish cap, which Mr. Crepe often wears. But here’s a tiny problem– look at the size of it compared to his hand. Mr. Crepe is a pretty big guy so you can get a sense of how large that sculpted head is. I had completely forgotten to tell him that cake toppers are usually pretty small. Even worse, I wasn’t paying much attention to scale at that point because all I saw were all those nice little details. Which meant that he did not stop working on this giant cake topper. Oops.

Once I arrived in Nashville a couple weeks before the wedding, I saw what he had actually made and immediately burst out laughing. There was no way that this cake topper would make it on top of a cake! The finished “cake topper” would end up being almost two feet tall!

So I grabbed some clay and a tiny sculpting tool and quickly copied what he had begun.

We teamed up to finish sculpting. Four hands are faster than two! Luckily, we work well together- when it comes to sculpting, I’m better at blocking out general shapes fast and he’s amazing at doing beautiful finishing touches. He made the perfect fabric folds on the clothing and the cute suspenders on elderly Mr. Crepe. (I do take credit for giving myself some Asian mom hair. Couldn’t resist.)

I don’t have a photo yet of the finished cake topper but I can’t wait to show you during recaps!

We REALLY cut it close with this cake topper. How close was it? Mr. Crepe was still painting it the morning of the wedding. I’m so glad he was able to finish it though because it meant so much to him that we had this at our cake table. Throughout that last week before the wedding, I kept mentioning that we should have a back-up topper (I had found two bespectacled coconut monkeys in sombreros at an antique shop. Would have been hilarious, no?) but he wasn’t having any of it.

What project did you have to tag team to get done?