What the heck is a Pomander you ask?

As I said before, Stacie and Matt were a little stressed with the wedding. Working full time, going to school full time is one thing but having Matt in Louisiana every 2 weeks and back only a few days before the wedding, changing jobs and possibly having to move before the wedding, Grandpa passing away the week before, changing the wedding date.....and more, it's was a little much. So Teri and I got put in charge of decorating the church. Or should I say Teri volunteered because she's kinda OCD like that. ( I shall refrain from further comment being that I can't really talk.) So here are the pictures from start to finish of decorating the church. We went back and forth between so many idea's that just weren't working and when I finally came up with the pomander's we thought is was awesome.  In fact we had a little 'Go, Fight, Win!' chant going on...yes we are total dorks. So we ended up making everything from scratch and we knew the time commitment we were getting into, but I don't think you every really realize until you do it. To say all day is one thing, to do it all day with all your siblings and breastfeed a newborn is something totally different. So here we are about 9am.  Your everyday church gym. Although this gym had windows.  This Grid at the top center is where it all came together. Getting the lights ready. Starting to put up the tulle 'false ceiling'. We wanted to hide the windows and scoreboard and basketball hoops and lower the ceiling/make the room feel smaller.  We knew exactly what we wanted but having never done this before and work with our dad and 2 brothers...One being the groom and totally distracted the other being Bart...what do I say...Love you Bart... ;)....it was a long day.   And just so you know, my dad Rocks.  Always and forever.  Seriously, my dad is So much cooler than your dad!  Niener, niener, niener! Raising it up and evening everything out. Teri and I Getting the tulle to hang right was a huge job.  I think it's about 2pm here, so 5 hours into it. We made these faces alot. Wow Teri, that sure is a hair-free nose you have there!  he he he! Matt/The Groom, he did a lot a little of this. And back down it comes to put up the lights. My Dad. Who is awesomer than your Dad. For those of you who don't know, and some of you that do (torilyn) i'm fully aware that awesomer is not a word. except it is...in the Hunt house. so is gooder and quicker and more better, just to name a few. Mom and Karen watched all the kids all day for me.  I'm sure they were going completely crazy! But Teri and I had to deal with Bart so it was even. (Karen, your a saint for marrying my brother!) The lights took the technical expertise of Bart. The girls thought this was a fantastic playground. Headed back up Securing the sides.  It was about this point that we realized that all 4 of us siblings have not worked together in a long time and we may or may not have acted as if we were all in our teens again.  Things like 'Shut yer trap, Parnell' may have been said. (have you seen Princess and the Frog? listen for that line...hilarious!)  I believe this was also the point that my dad realized how happy he was that the last one of his children was no longer living under his roof and he may have voiced how happy this made him in the mist of telling all of us to zip it and get back to work. Lol! Starting to hang the centerpiece. The pully broke that we were moving the entire thing up and down with.  So Bart was holding the entire thing up. Go Bart!   We might have killed him had he dropped it. ;) Then we got the whole thing stuck on the ladders. Good Times! (there were no swear words involved. hello! we were in a church!) And no one fell from any ladders...thankfully, cause those were really tall ladders. Sara, Jena and Allie. We debated with covering these blue wall panels but in the end we just left them. The tulle looked odd just hanging there when we had the lights on but as soon as we dimmed all the lights it did just what we wanted, which was shorten the room. And here I am 'fluffing' Pomanders.   We probably logged about 40 hours of fluffing! This is a good view of how much lower it brought the ceiling. But it doesn't do it justice because that night you didn't even notice anything above it. This was the food table. Here is a closeup of the famous Pomanders...In all their glory! And if you want to know the truth, I never want to see one again. ;) This is during the reception. It was so hard to get a good picture of how it actually looked.  All the lights were dimmed and it really turned out great.  At this point we had see it so much we could no longer tell if it looked good or not. Does that make sense? This shows a little better how dark the room was, but the flash shows up everything above the tulle that you didn't really notice. We did get tons and tons of compliments on it so hopefully it really was as good as we hoped it would be.  I've never been to a reception in a church gym that looked that good. And that was the goal. This is the best picture I have of the table centerpieces.  They were my 'vision'. ;) I was really happy with how they turned out. We used cream wreath holders and hung 3 different sized pomanders with a tiny lantern. They were so cute. Then they added pictures of Matt and Stacie and it ended up really cute.  I L.O.V.E the organza ribbon we used to hang the lanterns and pomanders.  L.O.V.E IT.  I keep trying to come up with something else to use it for.  Nothing brilliant has come to me yet. Stacie wanted the cake to be right in the center below the centerpiece on a round table.  All the tables were either too big or too small so we went to Home Depot and bought a round wood table top. I thought we would just set it on there and the next thing I know my Dad is bolting it to the table.  That cracked me up.  Total DIY Job! ha! ha! We also wanted to light up the cake better so we hung a flashlight inside that bottom lantern and it was Perfect! Just funny little details only we knew about. So total it took us 12 hours to decorate the room and 1 1/2 hours to take it all down! {sigh}  It was all worth it though!