Our friends the Zamoras let us borrow lots of the pretty things we used - votive holders and candles and tea lights. Their daughter Amorette was married last summer and Lisa, who had come to help me string twinkle lights the week before the reception, brought with her several boxes of things she thought we might like to use. Wow - what a godsend. Just seeing the pretty jars helped me figure out what we would do. Rolando helped assemble a patio heater and offered other help.
Now
Try to imagine 50+ more candles/tea lights/votives placed in pretty jars and lanterns around the yard - hanging, sitting on tables etc. Imagine the regular patio furniture moved to the back side of the yard, on the grass with the side tables topped with house shaped lanterns with candles glowing inside. On the patio, imagine 4 round tables with white table clothes and blue runners placed across the middle - in the center of the tables were candles - a votive wrapped in white and silver sparkly ribbon inside a small round vase, and three glass votive holders, (all different kinds), each with a tea light inside, surrounded the one small vase. Simple but very pretty.
The food table was beautiful - all prepared by Julie Baker Cancilla and her crew. Everything was displayed in such a lovely way. And everything was "finger food"ish - we had no silverware, only plates and tooth picks. Our "food" choices were cinnamon twists, individual monkey bread (served in pretty paper liners), lemon bars in paper liners, cream puffs with powdered sugar dusted on top or chocolate on top, cubed cheeses, a huge lovely silver plater/bowl filled with cut up fruit - pineapple, grapes, strawberries, oranges and lovely tiny little round shortbread cookies. Delicious!
--notice the blue and white runners hanging off the serving table? Similar runners were
on the round tables - Sara's mother made them for the AZ reception and sent them our way so
we could use them too--
Outside on the patio we had the drink table offering water, hot cider, and hot chocolate with chocolate sprinkles, and marshmallows and whip cream to be added if you liked and spoons dipped in chocolate to use for stirring.
Imagine the smaller wood circle moved to another wall and the picture underneath (it's Eric and Sara pre wedding picture) placed on top of decorative luggage.
The wood circle was on that big bare wall with 4 engagement pictures of Eric and Sara placed next to it in a very pleasing balanced arrangement (Thank you Nancy!) The TV played a DVD picture montage of Eric and Sara - growing up, dating, pre wedding video. The DVD was made by Sara's sister and it is very well done.
And yes, there were some flowers :-) Imagine these arrangements on 3 round tables in the family room. The vases were arranged the same way as the vases outside but instead of candles they held flowers - one hydrangea in the small round vase, and the glass votive holders held freesias, paper whites and roses instead of tea lights. Again - Thank you Nancy! The other arrangements were simple as well, either tightly grouped roses at the guest book and piano or mixed bouquets in just a couple random places.
Most of the front room furniture was put in the garage so the receiving line had space to stand and greet our guests who came in through the front door.
Some of our clean up crew - a guest of honor Eric :-) A guest from a far off place - Jan :-) and a guest/great home teacher Marty Judd who returned to help set the house back up.
It took less than 45 minutes!!
This is the morning after. So imagine it dark - the arbor lit with twinkle lights that draped to 4 corners and wrapped around the main legs, and the paper lanterns were filled with two strands of white lights. In the background there you can see more paper lanterns. Each lantern had a timer battery votive. The votives were in plastic snack bags, one each, and we - me and Claudia - hung the bag in the lantern
by poking it onto the hooks that are on the lantern wire frame. They worked great! (well some of the votives did not come back on when they were supposed to but by the end of the night they were
all on :-) To look at it in the first picture you'll understand why many of us
said it looked like the tree of life.
So that's that. It's all over - everything is down and put away. The lanterns are onto their next adventure already - the adult stake dance.
Special thanks to: Eric and Sara for getting married
Tom and Kathy Curtis, Sara's parents, for coming from AZ to the open house and helping us with set up and take down
Tom and Jozie Curtis, Sara's brother and sister in law who live in Concord and came for the open house and helped us with set up and take down
Ryan, Don, Nancy, Scott, Jan, Gregg, Claudia, Mark, Marty and Heather Judd, Lisa and Rolando Zamora - all of them helped in either setting up or taking down or both - and many more things.
You know what they say about many hands... I'd like to add "and smiling faces" It would have been such a different experience without the help of our friends and family.
And I will always regret not taking pictures :-/
