What do you do when you can’t find cherry-blossom themed wedding stuff? Make it! (Or apparently wait two years until that particular theme becomes massively popular… go figure)
In our case, it led to some truly wonderful projects, so I’m not very sad that we couldn’t find things off the shelf. First, we disassembled, spray painted blue, reassembled, and then hand-painted our favor boxes.
Next we get to the origami. In this case, we made pink and white cherry blossoms, koi, and frogs. The ceremony was on a deck looking out onto a koi pond, so we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to double up on the theme. The frog is a model that actually includes toes on the feet!
It turns out the cherry blossom origami was just too time consuming, so we ended up finding paper punches in two sizes and using dots of that tacky stuff that holds credit cards to the paper they send them to you on to hold the two layers together to form little flowers. On top of that, we found a model for business card holders that we used as frames for the name cards. The “tree” that held them was actually a photo holder by Umbra. We used the same stickum to put the little blossoms on.
One thing we had to consider when we decided on the origami for the centerpieces was that we wanted to reinforce the pond theme. Originally we talked about getting some of that gel that looks like water, but in the end figured the real thing would be just fine (and much cheaper). That presented the problem of how to keep the origami from unfolding.
The frogs were easy enough because it was already metallic green foil paper, so it held its shape naturally. The koi, however, were a different beast altogether. The paper we used had a thick, plasticky texture. We chose it because it had a pearlescent quality to it that fit perfectly for koi. Enter the spray adhesive and aluminum foil. We glued the fancy pearlescent paper to aluminum foil and then folded the fish. They held their shape admirably, at least for the wedding itself. After that the glue couldn’t withstand the water, but they’d served their purpose at that point.
