Great Balls of...Paper?

Ok let's talk about something pretty today!

When the time came to think about aisle decor I was pretty blase about the whole thing.  I mean it's pretty and all but who really notices anyways, you know what I mean? So when Collette, our wedding coordinator, asked me what my plan was, I was at a total loss (seems to be my trend). I had pinned some inspiration quite some time ago, back when Mr. Farmer and I first got engaged (and when I was still using Pinterest) but I haven't even thought about it since then. 

The reason I haven't given it much thought? Because our aisle looks like this:

photo by The Florian Gardens via Facebook

It's a nice slab of cement. So the traditional aisle runner that I wanted to do was out. Cement and aisle runners do not get along very well. The wind gets a hold of it and creates ripples and creates a tripping hazard. I don't want Mr. Farmer to whip out his EMT training on our wedding day because someone fell. I would feel awful if someone hurt themselves at our wedding. No bueno. I would have loved to have one but logistics canned that idea and let's be real here, I would more than likely be the one tripping.

  My other fabulous dumb idea was this:

photo by Vienna Ramnauth

Isn't it funny when you look back at things you thought were interesting, only to look at them now and think, WTF MISS. BARN ARE YOU ON CRACK!?

This idea is pretty in theory but I would be way too scared of someone knocking it over and staining my dress or someone stepping on broken glass. Just looking at this now gives me anxiety at all the things that could potentially go wrong for an accident prone bride such as myself. *shudder*

Thankfully, I have a pretty awesome wedding coordinator who suggested hanging something from the shepherd's hooks that I could rent from them. Hey, I like the sound of that. Mama Barn had an idea and we went with it (to be fair I had pinned this project a while ago so it was a joint effort).

Photo via Pizzazzerie.com

I figured these would be the perfect thing to line our aisle with and would be fairly inexpensive to construct.

You need:

Paper of your choice

Hydrangea Punch

Pins

Styrofoam Balls

4' Styrofoam Balls - Photo via Ebay 

Ribbon

5/8'' navy ribbon photo via The Tulle Shop

These were pretty simple to make. All you do is punch and pin. Punch and pin. We used a slightly shimmery white paper and it looks pretty awesome in real life. There were some things that made the process a lot easier though. 

The first tip: It was faster if you punched a whole sheet of paper first

Mama Barn decided at the last minute to get some sequin to add to them and it really added a nice element to the flower. Everyone who has seen them loves the little detail. 

Once all the flower petals were punched it was pretty easy. Stick your sequin, pierce your flower and then fluff.

We decided to do two colors to add some contrast up the aisle, and to help keep costs down we used regular pins that Mama Barn already had in her sewing collection (not that it saved mega bucks but makes me feel better). The original tutorial suggests using the pearl topped pins but they were more expensive and they didn't come in a large enough quantity so you could spend some serious dough on the pins. I suggest if you are going to use regular pins make sure that the head is big enough to keep the sequin from falling off, if you decide to add the sequin.

We also flexed the petals a bit before we stuck them into the ball, especially because we only used one punch per pin, whereas the inspiration used two. The longest part of the assembly process was stabbing the needle through the sequin hole and then pushing it through the paper. 

This was the easy part!

We would push the flowers into the ball and when it was finished we would go over it again to see if there were any spots that needed to be filled in or pins that needed to be moved. The paper we used was just a sheet of card stock that we got at the local Michael's. We created 12 balls and it took the three of us (Mama Barn, MOH Fluff, and me) close to about 6 hours. I wanted to see how many pins each 4" ball would take and it was roughly 150 pins for each ball (you're welcome for that). Which means we went through approximately 1800 pins and punches!!

For the pink pomanders here we wrapped it with a fuchsia tissue paper before pinning the flowers down so that the "space" between each pin wouldn't be as noticeable. At the end we had extra flowers so we combined the colors to create 2 pomanders that will be used for the first rows at the venue. We figured this would be a good way to differentiate our VIPs. 

This wasn't a very expensive project as the most expensive part was the Styrofoam balls. I totaled my costs and I came to to $50.55. Mama Barn bought about $12 worth of supplies so the total was $62.55. Thankfully the weekend we worked on this project JoAnn's was having a great sale so we used coupons for the three trips we had to make (it always sucks when you run out of something). 

My final tip: Make sure you buy enough the first time around. It's easier to return stuff than have to keep sending your brother to the craft store with a coupon and picture (way to go bro, always willing to lend a hand).

We also decided to make another kind using a different kind of paper flower. I ordered some carnations from eFavormart for pretty cheap ($49.16) after seeing some people on the boards of WB talk about them. I ordered these before Mama Barn came up with her idea to use the punched flower pomanders, however they did not go to waste. We have decided to use these as decoration throughout the venue.

I ordered white and fuchsia and made 1 solid color and 2 mixed colors. The mixed colors will be given to our flower girls to carry.

As soon as our flower girl saw this she was so excited to carry it. 

All photos personal unless noted

So there ya have it, an alternative to an aisle runner. What did you decide to line your aisle with or did you forego decor all together?