DIY PITA paper wedding flowers* part 3

*subtitle: All's well that ends well.


You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.

On Friday, the tulle-covered wire got squeezed into my car, and the flowers went over to the church in the back of Will's car. The whole afternoon was devoted to decorating the church and rehearsing for the ceremony, and we were lucky enough to have a whole team of people helping out.

While I was running around being the virgo elementary-school teacher that I am (read: picky and bossy) my mom and aunt Meghan and uncle John took over the arch-making job. They spent about three hours wiring and gluing and getting the arch to look like something I wouldn't hate.

I am seriously grateful to them. This was a sucky job, and I was not up for finishing it, even if I had the time, which I didn't. And, while Karl Lagerfeld still kicked our asses in the giant paper flower arena, at least I'm not a murderer. I was actually pretty happy with the final result:

However, after the wedding, I felt like this is one of the few things I would do differently if I had to do it all over. It was definitely one of the more expensive parts of our wedding (giant pieces of paper are not cheap!) and it was definitely the least green part (paper is made of trees!) and it was by far the most time consuming part (around 100 hours total!) And it wasn't really necessary -- our ceremony would still have been special and beautiful if it had been framed by the gazebo alone instead of by the arch attached to the gazebo.

If you're thinking of doing something similar, honestly, I would encourage you to think again. It's probably not worth it.

And yet...Writing this up (and, yeah, reading my mom's comment on part two) made me realize that the stupid flower arch is an integral part of what I'll always remember about getting married. If nothing else, it proves that a lot of people love me enough to put in a lot of time doing not-fun stuff just to satisfy a crazy fantasy of mine.

Will always says that our wedding looked like a wedding in a movie -- the colors were so vivid and the whites were so bright and the weather was so perfect and everything was decorated so beautifully -- and the arch was a big part of that. It really did frame our ceremony.

So....Maybe I would do it again, even knowing what I know now.... But probably not.