The Wedding: Act II - The Rehearsal Dinner

We'd worked very hard all week to make sure we were ready for Saturday.  So by Friday morning there were only a few things left to do: namely, the rehearsal dinner and the flowers.  We couldn't really do those earlier anyway because, unlike when we painted our house, we were going for Vintage Ghetto, not Gothic Dead.

My mom's side of the family (all from out of town) wasn't flying in until the morning of the wedding, so the rehearsal dinner was my dad's side of the family, most of MacGyver's family, and the few extra people in the wedding party that weren't MacGyver's family.  All in all it was a really fantastic time.  Since the reception was the part of the wedding I was most looking forward to anyway, this was a nice preview of what was to come the next night.

We did a quick run through of the wedding ceremony with the wedding party going over most of the important bits (emphasis on most) before everyone left for the evening.

Mr. and Mrs. B stayed after most of the guests left to help with flowers.  We had four bridesmaids bouquets to make, my bouquet, eight (?) boutonnieres to manufacture, and a handful of corsages.  It was about 8:00pm when we started.  Because that's how I roll.

We had all the flowers sitting in big five gallon buckets in my mom's laundry room  so we set up shop in there.  The bouquets actually went fairly quickly and they turned out spectacularly.  I didn't take any photos of us making them because, well, we were busy making them.  But I assure you that between my mom, myself, Mr. and Mrs. B, and my brother's girlfriend, we rocked those bouquets.

Here are some of my bouquet.  I don't think I have any that are just the girls' bouquets without the girls in them, so I'll wait until the next post for those.  The charms on my bouquet are of both of my grandfathers and one of my grandmothers who have passed away.  I found the hardware at Joann's and used sepia colored photos of them.  The pictures of my dad's parents are their wedding photos.  It was a nice way to honor them at the wedding.

The bouquets turned out pretty awesome.  The boutonnieres on the other hand...not so much.  After much fussing, my mom called for reinforcements.  One of her best friends, Mrs. H, is apparently knowledgeable about these things and offered to help us if we needed it.  She has been in my life as long as I can remember.  She's driven me to school when I missed the bus, and we stayed at her house a few times when my parents went on trips.  I love Mrs. H.  When Mom called her, she came straight over and set to work.  We used some leaves from the lilies in the large bouquet to lay the roses on and tied them all together with some floral tape.  Even MacGyver had to admit they looked pretty snappy!

My parents went to bed shortly after we finished the flower stuff.  I sat down to go through the wedding slideshow one more time and review the playlist for the reception.  It was about then that I realized MacGyver and my brother, Turbo, had been drinking since about noon.  It was now about 11:00pm.  I won't detail everything that happened in the next few hours, but it involved singing and dancing and other drunken debauchery.  I finally went to bed around midnight because the girls were showing up the house about 10am to get ready and I wanted to sleep.

I hadn't really been nervous about getting married in the months and weeks leading up to the wedding.  But I remember that the last thoughts I had before falling asleep that night were that tomorrow my name was going to be different, and that started to freak me out just a little bit.

Okay a lot.

Plain Diaper Cakes are for Sissies

My good friend, Mrs. B, is having her first baby in March and Mr. B and I decided to throw her a surprise baby shower last weekend.  As soon as she told me she was pregnant I started looking for fun baby craft projects and stumbled on this little gem.  

I was just kidding about that plain diaper cakes are for sissies thing.  Seriously though, anyone can give a diaper cake.  But a diaper tricycle?!  Yes, please!  By the way, people are selling these for a small fortune on Etsy if you're not feeling crafty.  I might need to get in on that, as a matter of fact.

Mrs. B is actually going to use cloth diapers, but I knew there was simply no way I was going to get that many cloth diapers made in time.  When we were painting her nursery a few weeks ago, I casually asked her if she would like to have a stash of disposables for emergencies and to keep in the car, etc.  

Heh, heh.  I'm so sneaky.

(Please excuse the weird focus on the pictures.  MacGyver is a much better photographer than I am.)  You'll need about 55-60 diapers, two bibs, two receiving blankets, a pair of socks, an angel food cake pan, rubber bands, ribbon, some safety pins, and a bottle that for our purposes you're going to pretend is also in the picture.  

Eh hem.  

You're going to make one large wheel and two smaller wheels.  For the larger wheel I used about 30 diapers.  You can adjust it to your liking.  You'll want enough to make it nice and sturdy.  Start by staggering the diapers about 3/4" apart and wrapping them around the center of your poor battered angel food cake pan that your mom gave you when you got your first place in college.  Keep adding diapers in the same direction until they start meeting the first diaper.  Then start pinching the diapers toward the middle and twisting as you add more.  When you've added all the diapers you'll have a nice pinwheel in the pan and you can adjust them until they are evenly spaced and looking pretty.

Gently press the bottom of the pan up from the bottom to expose the outside of your wheel.  This takes a little dexterity, but while you have the wheel lifted up, wrap a rubber band around the outside to hold it all together.

Then pop that bad boy out of the pan!  You'll probably want to adjust the diapers again after this as they can shift a little when you're putting on the rubber band.  Rinse and repeat two more times for the smaller wheels.  I used about 20 diapers per small wheel, but you can make them however you like.

When you've got all three wheels ready (how cute are these?!), carefully widen the centers of the wheels so there are holes an inch or so in diameter.

Wrap the ribbon around the rubber bands to cover them up and secure with a safety pin.  I picked diaper pins since I new Mrs. B will be doing the cloth diaper thing most of the time.

Take one of the receiving blankets that you had to go back to the store and buy after you accidentally cut right through the middle of the ones you were making for Baby B and threw a fish flopping fit involving naughty words that are not suitable for baby ears.

Eh hem.  Don't be like me.

Roll up the blanket into a tight roll.  I didn't take a picture of this (I was still mad about the first blankets I ruined), but if you fold the blanket in half and then roll it up, it's a lot easier and stays rolled tighter.  Either way, you want a long, rolled blanket.

Rinse and repeat with the second blanket.  

Thread one blanket through the center of the larger wheel...

...and pull the ends around and snake them through each of the back wheels to join in the middle.

Secure it with a safety pin.  Don't worry about making this part pretty - just slide it inside one wheel and you'll never see it.

Make sure the treads are facing the same direction on the back wheels or it will look weird.  You don't want weird looking tires, now do you?  I didn't think so.

Take the other blanket and feed it through the center of front wheel until the ends are even.

Lay one of the bibs across the front wheel and secure it under the ribbon you used to cover the rubber band.

I saw this bib on etsy and didn't have time to order one.  I used t-shirt transfer paper that you print on and iron onto fabric.  I have no idea how well this will work as a bib, but it's cute.

Do the same thing with the other bib across the back tires, and secure the ends inside the front wheel center.  This will become the seat.

For the visual learners...

Remember that baby bottle we were pretending was in the first photo?  Lay it on top of the front wheel with the bottom facing the front of the tricycle.  Pull the ends of the second blanket up like bunny ears around the bottle and secure tightly with a rubber band.

Wrap ribbon around the rubber band to cover it up, and put the socks on over the ends of the blanket for handle bars.  This tricycle is for a boy, but pink tassels would be fun on a girl tricycle!  Not that there is anything wrong with boys liking pink, I just haven't had a chance to ask Baby B if he likes pink and I don't like to assume.

Though as an aside, I picked green and yellow for the colors because I like them, and blue seemed a little cliche.  Halfway through making this I realized Mr. B went to OSU - long time rival to my alma mater, U of O - whose colors are green and yellow.  This made me chuckle.

(Read the subliminal messages, Baby B!  Come to the dark side!  We have candy!)

And you're done!

This took about 2 hours to put together start to finish, but I imagine it could be done in less.  It was a big hit at the shower!

Happy crafting!

Rubber Baby Buggy Bumpers

One of my dear friends is having a baby in June, and we threw her a baby shower a few weekends ago.  I should go ahead and put this out there now that I loathe these little get-togethers.  I find them excruciatingly painful.  And it's not that I don't like my friends.   I adore them.  I just hate people in general.  And being around them for extended periods of time just pisses me off.  We here in the psych world call that Social Anxiety.  For our purposes we'll just say I'm a bit of a freak and move on.

Back to the food.  I like being in charge of something involved when I have to go to these things because it gives me purpose.  It gives me a reason for being there, and something to do with my hands, because when I'm in big groups of people I am at a complete loss about what to do with my hands!  Hence, the food.  If I'm in charge of food, I don't have that problem.

When I was little I remember my mom making a whale out of a watermelon.  She carved out the top of the watermelon and fashioned a tail from that part of the rind, and then scooped out the innards.  She was left with a beautiful whale to be filled with balled melon, which is really the best way to eat melon.  There is just something about melon in the shape of a ball that makes it taste that much better, don't you think?

So I decided to make a watermelon whale for this shower.  And it hadn't occurred to me until this very moment while I am writing this post that a WHALE might not have been a good choice for a lady who has been pregnant for the last 35 weeks...hmm

Anyway I was hunting around the internet for a pattern and found some very interesting (and strange) food carvings.  I also discovered a site called "FoodPornDaily.com".  You should check it out.  Just probably not at work.  You don't want to have to explain that one to your IT guy.

As I'm sure you can imagine, I was awestruck by this Food Porn business, and was sidetracked for a great while.  Fascinating stuff.  But when I finally got back to my original task, I found the most amazing idea ever EVER: a Baby Buggy made from a WATERMELON!

I said to myself, 'Self, this is brilliant!'  And I set off to create a watermelon baby buggy.  And create I did.

 

And I filled it up with balled melons.  They really do taste better, I promise.

And check out the watermelon flower that I totally carved all by myself!

I definitely channeled my inner Martha on that one!