The wedding theme

We have worked out the issues with the Sheraton and signed with them. We are due to be married in January, so yay!

Of course now, with about 5 months until the wedding day, we need to turn our full attention to the decorations. We're not incredibly rich, actually, we're on a very tight budget, so we were trying to think of a nice theme that would be fun and playful, but most importantly - cheap.

The solution? Origami! It's colorful, fun-looking, you can make just about anything with origami, and it's very very cheap. I do have some minor edge over others in that I am more familiar with origami than others since I've been obsessed with it since I was a little girl. Since origami is super vague and could mean freaking anything, we decided to further specify our theme as being origami - spring time.

The way we plan to incorporate this is by having origami flowers as the centerpieces for each table, using origami butterflies as the place-cards, placing origami insects around the room (along with many many flowers), and hanging little origami balloons off of chairs. On top of that, I have decided to make my bridal and bridesmaids' bouquets entirely out of origami flowers.

The good news: all of the decorations, centerpieces, bouquets, and place-cards will be very cheap, totaling less than $150 for paper, vases, and bouquet bases, which is about $750 (floral only) for the average wedding.

The bad news: it's a lot of work.

Here's all of what we are making out of paper for the wedding:

90 butterfly place-cards
9 reception table centerpieces (24 origami tulips per arrangement - that's 216 origami tulips)
2 cherry blossoms per reception table (each flower is made of 5 pieces of paper)
23 candy dishes (2 per reception table, the rest on the dessert and hors d'oeuvres tables)
3 bridesmaids bouquets (each containing about 70 flowers)
1 bridal bouquet (containing about 120 flowers)
4 boutonnieres
10 balloon w/floral aisle decorations
50 origami insects to be scattered around the room
100 additional flowers to be placed around the room

1 paper bonsai sculpture (approximately 550 sheets of paper)
1 paper peacock sculpture (approximately 800 sheets of paper)

When it's all said and done, I will have used about 5000 very colorful sheets of paper (all for the whopping cost of 50 bucks). Does it sound like I'm a mass tree-murderer? Well, I worried about that too, and the obvious fix is to make everything so beautiful that no one will want to chuck it, instead, they'd want to keep it. Everything will last a long time since nothing is made from fresh flowers, meaning they'll make excellent gifts for family and friends who want to snatch them up. Since my bouquet will have required so many hours of labor, I will not be tossing it, that's for sure! We already have plans for getting a vase to place my bouquet in as a decoration for our home.

Since I've started early and have no plans of slowing down or stopping, having these decorations prepared by the wedding date is probably a reasonable expectation. At least, I sure hope so...