Celebrating 40 years on Catalina: Decorations

In case you missed it, yesterday’s blog post explained why we were on Catalina and what we did while we were there.

As I said in yesterday’s post, my aunt, mom and I spent the past year planning, scheming and DECORATING. We went with a light blue/silver/white color scheme based around the idea that my grandparents had blue carnations at their wedding. We got a lot of use out of my Shillouette die cutting machine.

We thought it would be awesome to have whoever decorated the cake replicate my grandparent’s original cake design. This was more of a project than we thought it was going to be. About a month away, our original cake lady said she was no longer on the island. Luckily Katrina Lee of Island Cakes was flexible and able to grant our wishes. My Aunt Sally, who helped decorate the original cake, called her and tried to explain to her what it looked like because the only pictures we had of the original are pretty blurry. If that wasn’t a hassle, trying to figure out the cake topper was. We were unable to find ANYTHING that resembled the top of their original wedding cake so we just got wood veneer “40” numbers and painted them silver. My aunt used left over blue carnations from the center pieces as accents around the top and bottom of the cake. The blue on the cake was a little off, but all in all it was gorgeous and absolutely delicious!

One of the things I wanted to incorporate were two Geronimo balloons with tissue paper fringe. I thought it would make a great accent to “frame” the ceremony and have as decorations. My aunt spent the better part of Thursday night fringe-ing away. She also incorporated ribbon and had cut out hearts from POW paper and attached those. These tails were amazing. Too bad the ONLY balloon lady on the island wasn’t willing to work with us and fill up our balloons. Don’t mind the fact that my aunt had called her a couple months before and confirmed that she could fill up our 36″ balloons. Oh well, we ended up getting clear balloons and clustering them together. It wasn’t our vision, but it worked. You better believe we brought those fringe tails home with us! They are too adorable to go to waste!

Some of the other decorations we “DIY”ed included the Happy 40th anniversary banner with a tissue paper fringe background, the centerpieces, water bottle labels, “BROWN” block letters, the photo booth background and props, huge “40” made up of black and white photos, different wall hangings with quotes my grandpa wanted made, a photo book, and CD and packaging that was placed at each persons place setting.

Because this was a very small gathering (just my grandma and grandpas kids + their kids) there were a lot of people that are close with my grandparents, that were not able to attend. I had the idea to put together a guestbook of notes from other family members and close friends not attending, including notes from those attending as well. I sent out a 4×6 blank note card with an accompanying note describing what was going on, and directions for filling it out and getting it back to me. I placed the returned notes into a Studio Calico handbook and used these page protectors. I tucked the note I sent out to family and friends in the first page protector inside the book, embellished the front and called it a day.

We wanted to do a sand ceremony during the night. My aunt found this heart shaped glass bottle with a cork top, and two other glass bottles to hold sand. It’s hard to see in the picture but we got the heart glass bottle engraved with “Larry & Joyce 40 years” on one side and “Catalina 2014” on the other side. My good friend over at J & M Trophies took care of the engraving and we couldn’t be happier with the finished product. Everyone was able to put a little bit of sand into the bottle and at the end, my grandparents finished it off.