Dahlias & Cupcake Prototypes

I spent two lovely hours this morning picking dahlia's from a local gentleman's garden. He has over 400 plants, and they are all staked and beautifully cared for. I could have picked for hours, but instead I filled my 8 buckets as full as they could go and brought them home. I'll go back on friday for more, most likely...
This afternoon Aimee came over and we decorated some muffins with various possible designs using frosting, berries, and carrot & cucumber cut-outs (we'll use peaches or melons for the wedding day) until we found two designs we really liked. Don't they just look darling?
A lot of other stuff got done today too: Cary picked up the tuxes, he also went to Costco for the final shopping trip, and Dave finished the railing on the observation tower just for starters. I'm too exhausted now to remember everything, but I feel good about what we have done and what is still left to do... and I'm really looking forward to a facial & a massage tomorrow!

Cupcake Tower Decorated

I just finished decorating the cupcake tower this morning. I've been just working on it a little at a time, in my spare moments, for several weeks now. It feels good to have it done, and I think it turned out really nice.

It started a few weeks ago when Charlotte helped me put a coat of Gesso on it, because white cardboard just looks a bit too much like white cardboard.
(Wow - check out all those wedding dishes in the china cabinet!) After the paint dried, I applied clear vynil contact paper on the top side of all the circles, so they will be resistant to moisture - I'd hate to have a toppled cupcake lead to structural collapse! It also made the surface look much smoother and more uniform.

I started hot-glue-gunning the daisy trim to the edges of the circles after that. It was going pretty well until about a week ago when a bad case of operator error burnt quite a bit of skin off of my index finger. I took a break from the hot glue for a few days after that, which gave me time to glue the green & white striped paper to the supports.
This morning I decided I was sufficiently healed to finish the daisy trim, and now as you can see the whole thing is decorated & assembled. All that's left is to stack it with books to help the circles flatten out and the tabs settle in before the big day.

Here's a close up so you can see the striped paper and the daisies better:
It looks a little home-tech if you look at it closely - it's just cardboard covered with paper & glued on daisies, after all - but once it's covered with fabulously tasty organic cupcakes I think it'll be quite the stunning center peice!

Cupcake Tree

The cupcake tree was just delivered! Assembly & decoration is required, of course. The manufacturer has some cute decoration ideas on their website - I think flowers and leaves are probably the way to go for us. The cupcake tree is made entirely of cardboard but it seems good & thick, I think it will work well for at least one use. It sure beats the price of the plastic & metal versions that are designed to be re-used over and over, for instance by a caterer. The the metal or plastic ones available for general home use only hold 4 dozen or so cupcakes - great for most parties, but not big enough for a wedding.

Update: OMFG. I swear I did not know about this when I decided on cupcakes and a cupcake tree. Really. I haven't bought/read ANY of those wedding magazines that seem to be all over the grocery store checkouts... I'll have to put a disclamer in the program: "This wedding is an original hodgepodge of elements borrowed from other people's real-life weddings, liberally sprinkled with crazy ideas of my own. Any similarities between it and any wedding magazine, living or dead, is purely coincidental."

Marty gets Religion

1. Marty has gotten ordained by the Universal Life Church. Over 20 million ministers ordained since 1959 can't be wrong! And it's free. :)

2. I just officially requested the Marriage License Application Packet from the Whatcom County Auditor. They are going to mail it to me, I should get it Wednesday. Then we have to fill it out, sign it in front of a notary, and send it back with a check for $63. Somehow, this feels like a Really Big Deal.

3. The fabulous James Guzman has agreed to perform the musical accompaniment for the processional and recessional parts of the ceremony. Something classical, maybe a little flamenco-ish, on guitar. Abe Davis may also be a part of this. Our wedding just got about 29% cooler.

4. We've decided what to do about cupcakes - I'm going to get them made by the co-op so they'll be mostly organic (and super yummy), and then Aimee and Keeley and possibly some of the other ladies will decorate them on site. That way we get organic AND fancy frosting both, without committing any of our friends to days of slavery in the cupcake mines. Instead, they get just a few hours of hard labor in the frosting factory, which everyone says builds character.

5. My mom has bought her dress. It is beautiful, of course. VERY Mother-of-the-Bride. :)

Cupcakes

Anybody got any suggestions for where we should get our wedding cupcakes from? I think it's time to start comparing prices & availability. We don't have the confirmed number of guests yet, but we are starting to get an idea... 74 people have RSVP'd so far.

We need two kinds, carrot-cake and chocolate. Yum.