Wedding: Staying Organizing

Doing the entire decor for a wedding...especially your FIRST wedding....especially when it isn't YOUR own wedding....is a daunting task.  Staying organized is CRUCIAL and something that I can be great at when I need to be.  Because the barn was as rustic as it gets and a HUGE space to fill I needed to bring in a lot of decor.  Add in that I am a DETAIL kinda girl and you have a lot of minutia to organize.  I wanted to share some photos and ideas on how I kept everything in order. 

Once the poms were folded and the wire attached they were immediately stacked side-by-side and then layer by layer in a plastic tote.  I opened all the poms at the venue to keep them from getting crushed.  

Realistically, storing and transporting over 100 opened poms would have been a nightmare. 

 Brandin dropped off a tote full of old Mason jars; I kept them there until I needed them. 

Once they were decorated, I returned them to the tote.  However, in order to NOT crush the bows or poms, I kept the spacing loose.  I added a piece of cardboard on top of the smaller jars and stacked a second row.  We were very careful about moving the tote because of the double row and the fact that the jars were not pack tightly in the box. 

I gathered embellishments I thought I might use on the various projects and kept them in cheap plastic containers.  This allowed me to pull the appropriate containers as I completed various projects and then close the lid, move them off the workspace and into a large plastic tote where I kept everything "WEDDING" that I wasn't currently using. 

I made a lot of tags and other die cuts- notice all the tags from the Tiny Tabs and Tags die I used for the escort cards.  I also die cut letters (b's because they are Bill and Brandin), hearts, and numbers (the wedding date).  I stored them all in these plastic containers I got at Hobby Lobby and Michael's.  

Once we arrived at the barn to begin decorating, we had to keep things organized in order to know what we had to work with.  I did a lot of decorating on the fly...I had a few ideas before we arrived but some things I let flow more organically.  I would see what I had and then start plugging things into my little vignettes throughout the barn. 

 We kept like things together on the large table which was at the front of the barn on the "stage".

The jars became part of the centerpieces.  The centerpieces didn't all match- in other words I had a variety of jars-size, shape and look- to choose from.  I varied the specific pieces used as part of the centerpiece at each table but kept the overall concept the same.  I will post more about the centerpieces later.  

Other items that were used throughout the barn were also kept clustered together until used.  The votives were kept in the packaging they came in.  This allowed us to keep track of 64 votives as well as stack them on this table.  

Both tags shown here are part of the table decor.  I kept the smaller tags in a box so they wouldn't get lost.  The other box you see is full of the glittered clothes pins we used to hold the escort cards onto the vintage bedspring. 

More components of the center pieces were laid out in a way that minimized space but kept the bows from being crushed.  YES, bow-crushage is something I was a tad bit retentive about.  What of it?  There is nothing more sadder than a crushed bow at a wedding :(  Except maybe using improper grammar and emoticons in a blog post. 

I made a lot of rosettes.  We tied fishing line (monofilament) to them and laid them on this table so we could pull from the group as we used them randomly throughout the space.  

The poms were laid out all over the barn on tables.  As I mentioned I made over 130 poms so they took up a lot of space.  This was taken early in the process of opening them all.  We had the tables all week because they belonged to Brandin's mom.  If we had not had them, I would have laid the poms on the floor off to the side.  

Organizing everything kept me on task and on track.  It was crazy enough to deal with all the things that come up when decorating a space that is normally home to bees (hives everywhere), bats (yes, there was one looking at us from on top of the barn door) and other creatures that I'm sure I don't want to run into on a dark night.  Our crew of me, Brandin and Rick with various nieces thrown in had to stay on top of everything in order to get it all done in 4 days.

Have a day filled with Sunshine and Glitter.

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