flowers to dye for

My brave friend, Sarah, came over on Saturday to help me dye 200-something coffee filter roses. It took us about four hours, but much of that time was spent playing with the RIT dye trying to get the colors just right.

We (very scientifically) mixed different batches in mason jars, dipped coffee filter test strips into them, and put the strips on a cookie sheet in the oven at about 250 degrees for quick drying.



Satisfied with the spectrum we created, we began with yellow flowers, moved to shades of pink, coral, and red, and ended with the oranges. The tree outside was the best place to hang them to dry.



But we decided to speed up the drying process for a few of them, just to get a better idea of the final product all together.



Fluffed, to speed drying of the inner layers.



Annnnnnd... Flowers! Now, I have to decide between merely fluffed:



Or fluffed with each petal curled at the edges. Much more rose-like, but also much more work.



What do you like best?

DIY decoupage vases

A few posts back, I made mention of a literary theme to our wedding decor. There is a perfectly good explanation, and it's this: the library at Michael's university regularly cleans out its archives and puts dusty, old, crumbly books out on shelves in the lobby for anyone to take. Every time I visit him, I stop by the library to haul a stack of free books to my car.

They will be used in many ways -- probably even some ways I haven't thought up yet. But today I'll share one use for these tattered tomes.


I've been collecting smallish, cheap-o glass vases like these from garage sales and thrift stores...



... and decoupaging them with torn up pages.




Simple, cute, and cost-effective, but like many of my other wedding decorations, time-consuming, since I'm making enough for 20 tables. Only elect to do this if you're long on time or short on guests.

todos los flowers

The overtly Mexican Fiesta themed reception has been shelved in favor of something more... literary. But more on that later. Today, I want to share my flower project.

Problem? I want lots and lots of beautiful flowers I can't afford.

Solution? Make them. Hundreds of them. From paper.

Crazy? Maybe a little. But right now I'm short on cash and long on time (being underemployed has its benefits, I suppose), so for me, making my flowers makes sense.

Here are my first experiments in flower crafting. The yellow ones are made of tissue paper. The pink ones are crepe paper.




I was envisioning vases of lots of different shades of yellows, pinks, corals, and oranges. As it turns out, unless you're prepared to buy huge bulk quantities, it's pretty difficult to find a wide variety of subtly varied shades in tissue and crepe paper.

Aside from paper problems, I wasn't crazy about the pink flowers, and they were about three times more time consuming than the yellow carnation-style flowers.

I discovered coffee filter roses on Martha Stewart's website. They are beautiful, but also super-extra-time consuming. Plus, you had to paint each individual petal. I'm not that crazy.

Then, I saw a post on the discussion boards at weddingbee.com by a girl who made 200 of the suckers for her wedding and dyed them with fabric dye. When I learned this, I knew there was no going back.

I present to you, coffee filter roses, dyed with food coloring:



My goal is 300, completed by Christmas. I'm guessing I have about 70 so far.

Aaaand preliminary guesstimates on costs for 70 roses:

Floral wire - $1.25
Floral tape - $5.00 ($1.00/roll)
Coffee filters - $6.00 (~$2.00/200 count pack)

That comes out to about $0.18 per rose. When it's all said and done, it should cost me about $60.00 (and countless hours) to make 300 roses. I'll have a better cost breakdown when they're all finished and dyed.

I'll have to play around with them, but I might end up mixing the carnations and roses in the arrangements. What do you think?