mason jar wedding

Aside from the paper flower arch, the main diy decoration for our wedding was mason jar candleholders. The backyard of our church is surrounded by low walls. Follow a break in the foliage behind where our guests sat, and there is a stone labyrinth. Inspired by mason jar posts on pretty much every wedding blog I read, I decided to put candles in jars on all those walls and around the labyrinth.

I've read about people spending $3.50 or more for just one jar, and since I wanted around 200 jars, that would have cost more than the dessert catering or the scavenger hunt. I wasn't willing to give up food or fun for mason-jar prettiness, but I wasn't willing to give up on the idea, either.

I sent an email to everyone I work with, asking them to save pasta sauce jars for me (we've got free curbside recycling here, and people are used to rinsing their glass jars and throwing them in the recycling bin, so I wasn't asking them to do anything extra except bring them to school.) I also asked our friends and in-town family to save jars for us, and they started slowly piling up.

Over the course of about a month and a half, we had collected around 100 jars. My friend Danita loaned me another 25 or 30 (it is not easy to get the wax out afterward, so I don't recommend borrowing jars for this purpose.) Then my amazing cousin Melina saw me post about jars on facebook, and she offered to ship a bunch of them from Albuquerque. I didn't think it would be worth it, until she reminded me that she works for a large national shipping company. Apparently, she collected jars from all of her friends as well, and about 40 more jars arrived the day before the wedding! Wow!

When we moved into this house, we found a bag of sand, and I decided to put a little of the sand into the bottom of each jar before putting the candles in. I had the candles made locally with soy wax. Cache la Poudre Candleworks gave me a much better deal than I found anywhere except the dollar store. Hmmm...dollar store candles made out of who-knows-what by little children or underpaid adults in China and shipped halfway around the world, or local soy candles made to my specifications by someone I know...no contest!

It was still light out during the ceremony, but as it got darker and darker the candles got more and more dramatic. I came outside to cool off for a few minutes during the reception, and the yard seemed so magical it literally took my breath away. I almost wish that we'd planned to have the whole reception outside, not just the ceremony (though some people did hang out outside, the food and music were inside.) But I guess it's just as well we didn't, since the sprinklers turned on before the party was totally over!

If we had more time, I would have wired up jars to hang from trees or from the gazebo, and if we had more money I would have bought some shepherd's hooks to hang the jars from, creating sort of a path out to the labyrinth. As it was, we planned our wedding in only three months on a pretty tight budget, so I'm glad we were able to pull off the mason jar thing at all.

go here now!

I've got a couple of new posts in the works, and plans to get them up this weekend. In the meantime, click this link and follow the directions. Seriously. Do it now! Super important, and she says it better than I could. I knew this whole new toy law thing was freaky (or, as we say around here, pweaky*) but this aspect of it really has me pweaked out.

*Just like we still say Whole Poods, yip dyoss (that's lip gloss for you folks who didn't know Sebastian at two) and soooornbread (corn bread, with a drawn out long o from the time that Dante tried to correct my mispronunciation when really I was just imitating his mispronunciation: "It's not sornbread, mom, it's sooooooornbread!") even though it's been years since my kids couldn't pronounce those words

yet another reason to go locavore

Just in time for Halloween! Poison candy!

From truthorfiction.org: “Melamine is an industrial chemical compound that some Chinese milk-based product manufacturers have added to their products in an attempt to artificially inflate the reading for protein levels. Chronic exposure to melamine can cause a number of severe health issues including bladder or kidney stones, acute kidney failure, reproductive damage, respiratory irritation and bladder cancer.”

Melamine is the substance responsible for killing several Chinese babies and sickening thousands more who drank tainted formula.

We know for sure that there are products (pet food, for example) that have been imported to Canada and the US that contained melamine. We also know for sure that melamine in Chinese milk products remains an issue. Candies from China that were tainted with melamine were definitely exported to Canada and England. Specifically, Pirate’s Gold chocolate coins and White Rabbit chocolates sold in Canada, as well as 11 different Cadbury products in Great Britain and some Asian markets.

Right now, the FDA is basically telling American consumers not to worry about candy found in the U.S. (though this link does contain a list of other food products that have been imported from China and found to contain melamine.)

However, I think perhaps more caution is warranted for a couple of reasons. First, it is certainly possible, given the global nature of our economy, that candies originally slated for sale at Costco and dollar stores in Canada have made their way to Costco and dollar stores in the U.S. Second, and more importantly, it is possible that the problem is much greater in scale than just a few brands or types of candy.

According to the FDA website, the U.S. imports milk-derived ingredients including whole milk powder, non-fat milk powder, whey powder, lactose powder, and casein. The FDA is sampling and testing these products when offered for import from Chinese sources to determine if they contain melamine.

The Associated Press says that Hershey has never imported milk products from China for use in its candies. However, the AP reports that Mars North America’s statement says that its operations in China do not get any ingredients from companies found to be selling melamine-contaminated dairy products. It says the Chinese food-safety agency tested samples of Mars China's milk powder suppliers and found them to be free of melamine.

Maybe I’m just paranoid, but I really don’t trust Chinese food-safety agency tests at this point. And we really don’t know the scope of the contamination, so it’s possible that even if Mars doesn’t source from companies known to be selling melamine contaminated products, there are companies doing so that just haven’t been found out yet. Mars makes Snickers and M&Ms.

If you want to err on the side of caution, you might want to avoid any candies made by Mars, and really, ANY food products from China (this is more difficult that it might seem!) However, if you want to just eat your candy and not worry about it, this statement about toxicity levels from the FDA might make you feel better:

“In food products other than infant formula, the FDA concludes levels of melamine and melamine-related compounds below 2.5 parts per million (ppm) do not raise health concerns. This conclusion assumes a worst case exposure scenario in which 50% of a person’s diet is contaminated at this level, and applies a 10-fold safety factor to the Tolerable Daily Intake (TDI) to account for any uncertainties. The TDI is an estimate of the maximum amount of an agent to which an individual could be exposed on a daily basis over the course of a lifetime without an appreciable health risk.”

As a side note, the FDA says that NO level of melamine in infant formula is safe.

Happy Halloween!