Garter, Unity Candles and Cupcake Wrappers

This blog post will outline three more of the projects that I have been working on lately... My garter, our unity candles, and cupcake wrappers.

Garter

First, let's look at my garter. Below is a picture of it finished. 

 

I did not buy any new ingredients for this, I had all of them laying around. What I used was purple and gold ribbon, a piece of black elastic about 1" wide, and some lace fabric with scalloped edges (you can kind of see the scallops in the picture below). The fabric and my ribbons I used are below. 

I had no pattern, I just started experimenting to see what would work. I started by taking the elastic piece and stretched it around my leg to see how long of elastic I would want. I then stretched the elastic as far as possible and I made the purple ribbon and the teal scalloped lace that length. 

The key to this project is pinning. I used three separate layers of lace at different lengths. I started by pinning all three layers of lace together. I then added on the purple ribbon on top of the lace and pinned the 4 layers together. I took the 4 layers of lace/ribbon, stretched the elastic tight, and pinned all of the 5 layers together. When I was pinning I made sure that the purple ribbon stuck up further than the elastic so that black elastic would not be sticking out the top of the garter. Then I sewed the 5 layers together. Also, so that it wasn't just straight black elastic on the inside of the garter, while I was sewing the front of the garter on, I included an extra piece of ribbon in the inside and sewed that on as well. 

At this point I had a long string of garter. I measured the length I wanted again and sewed the garter into a circle. And waa-la it looks like a garter :) 

To make the bow on the front I took the same purple ribbon I used before (didn't measure a length) and did a loose stitch all along the bottom of the long piece of ribbon. I did this so that I could bunch up the ribbon to make this flower. Once I had the flower I hot glued the gold ribbon as accent and then hot glued the whole flower onto the garter.

There it is, a garter that cost me nothing to make. :)

Unity Candles

Second, let's look at the unity candles. These are super neat!

First of all, where does "forever, always & no matter what" come from" you ask? Well when Michael and I were dating for 9 months (both 16 years old) he wrote me an adorable poem that still hangs on my wall today. The poem ended with these lovely words. You will see them sporadically through out various wedding projects :) Another of my favorite quotes from the poem is "these last nine months have been the best ever, but that is not saying much considering we will last forever." What a sweetheart. :)

Anyway, onto the unity candles... I have seen on Pinterest people printing on tissue paper and then using a hairdryer to melt the tissue paper into a candle.. This is exactly what I did. I first printed everything on a regular piece of card stock. Then I used that printed piece of paper and covered just the part needed with tissue paper. My printer wouldn't suck in card stock when the whole thing was covered with tissue paper, so this was my solution. Once I taped the tissue paper on the card stock I printed again so it would be on the tissue paper. Then I cut out the tissue paper and used a hairdryer to melt the paper into the candle. That was it. Below is a picture of the candle with tissue paper in it:

Although it looks pretty darn good in this picture, it isn't perfect. From the hairdryer extra wax melts and pools weird places. To smooth out the wax I rolled the candles while they were still hot to get them back to their form. But, it still wasn't perfect so I decided to add some ribbon to make it all look beautiful. It is like the trim to a house, necessary...

So I measured and cut my lengths of ribbons. Then last night I slept on how I was going to attach the ribbon to the candles. I contemplated double sided tape or hot glue, but I figured they wouldn't stick to the candle... So I decided I needed some pins. Now sewing pins I have galore, but they are a little too long. So I scavenged to find something else that would work. I found these tac pins (below) that I thought just might work. So I took off the plastic white part. When I took the white part off, look what I found! It was a small headed nail soldered with metal around it... My mind was churning with how I could cover up the pin... But then I had a better idea-- maybe I could separate the small nail away from the rest. I saw small nails like this at JoAnn the other day for only $0.99, but I didn't buy them so I got to work at trying to free the nails.

I got out my handy dandy pliers and did some mangling of the tops and with a bit of time and frustration, the nail came loose! There I had it, the perfect nails to attach my ribbon to my candles. I ended up needing 4 per ribbon, so 24 total. 

Then I put on each of the ribbons with the pins. It worked out really well. Of course, the pins aren't perfectly in line or anything, but it worked! I am even proud enough to show a picture of the back of the candle with all of the pins. Lovely. 

The only caution here is your poor thumbs. They hurt so bad from trying to push the darn nails into the candles. I fashioned myself a thimble at one point, which helped.

The total price for the project was $10.50. It was $5 for the center pillar from Walmart, $1 for the two taper candles from the Dollar Tree, $2 for the 2 taper stands from the Dollar Tree, and $2.50 for the pillar stand from Walmart. I had the ribbon and the nails laying around. Not bad.

Cupcake wrappers: 

Ok, so the last project on this blog post is my cupcake wrappers. I decided to do cupcakes because 1) I did not want to ask a young cousin to have to sit there and cut and pass out cake and 2) I didn't want to pay the cake cutting fee for someone from the Metropolis to do it for me. So, an easy solution was cupcakes that will sit at each table.

Instead of boring cupcakes with the regular white baking cups, I wanted to jazz them up somehow. I have seen and love the paper cupcake wrappers, but they are sooo darn expensive. So I did more internet research and saw people making awesome cupcake wrappers from paper doilies. I decided to give it a go.

Here is what I came up with and I love them!

So, the question is how did I do it? Like all other projects, I started at the dollar tree. I found these doilies below for $1. One of my accent colors is gold, so I was so happy to have found gold doilies. Online there are a plethora of doily colors that you could use. They are 10 inch doilies. 

I deconstructed a legit cupcake liner to figure out how big to make each wrapper. I traced the wrapper onto the back of the doily. Then I cut out the middle circle (as seen below) and then cut the outer ring into three separate wrappers. I realize the pieces in the picture don't fit together (they weren't from the same cutting) but I promise it works.

Once you have the three wrappers all you to is tape/glue them together. As you can see in the picture below I am pinching one together. I haven't decided how I am going to secure them yet.. It isn't like the cupcakes will touch the wrapper, but food is still near it so I need to do some thinking. Hot glue? Tape? Regular glue? Not sure yet... 

The total cost for all of the cupcake wrappers will be under $20, depending on how many cupcakes I use. Each package is $1 which makes 24 cupcakes. I was just looking at how much it is to buy the cupcake wrappers and they are between $0.75 for plain wrappers to over $1 a piece for intricate wrappers! Goodness! Another neat idea would be to make them yourself if you have a Cricut, but I don't so that option was out.

Wheph those are all of my projects for now. I think I am going to save the rest of my general table decorations as a surprise. All I can say is be excited! My theme unconsciously has morphed from peacock to earth, fire and water (as was pointed out by my mom). I am glad my subconscious is as in love with the outdoors as I am. :)

As a note to you potential peacock brides, peacock feathers are darn hard to work with being one dimensional. If you do it, good luck :)