i’ve been a bit quiet over the last week or so. i promise i have been working on projects (we’re in the final stretch with the wall hanging project…ahhhh!) and i’ve also been trying to capture some creative inspiration, and something worthy of writing about. rather than showcasing the last two lines of the wall hanging i’ve finished (i’m holding firm and not doing another update until it’s done), it took coming home to get a little bit of inspiration.

i’ve been thinking about my crafting in the sense of what i’m working on now, but being at my childhood home reminded me of one of my first big crafting projects that i was working on eight years ago. it was the year of planning our wedding, martha stewart weddings was my go-to magazine for wedding ideas and it was in a fall or winter 2002 edition that i saw exactly what i wanted to do for our wedding. two words: beaded flowers.

the article showed these amazingly intricate flowers made with thin jewelry wire and teeny, tiny beads…made petal by petal…and all wound together in this beautiful way to create a single flower. i knew these had to be a part of our wedding, but i had to figure out how. and then it came to me…these would be the favor for our guests and they would also hold each guest’s table assignment. with that, i started on a 12 month journey of making 180 beaded flowers.

our colors were simple…black, ivory with small touches of red. so, i went simple with the flowers and decided on clear beads for the petals with red and green accents for the flower centers.

i can’t even tell you over the course of a year how many bags of beads i bought. or how many hours i spent making the tiny, intricate flowers. (i think by the end, i had it down to a science and i was making about a flower-an-hour. one of the most vivid memories i have is being curled up on the couch at my mother’s house, right after christmas, one month before the wedding, and staying up until 3am to finish the very last, 180th flower.)

the other decision to make was how we were going to set these up and present them to our guests. i looked at small glass vases. then, the idea to tie mike’s background into this endeavor…being in grad school, getting a degree in chemistry was inspiration enough. there’s all kinds of cool glassware in the chemistry world. that was inspiration enough.

we looked at test tubes. and then we finally came across erlenmeyer flasks. (for anyone who has blocked out your chemistry education like i have, see here.) a large quantity were ordered and we had our vases to house the beaded flowers.

by the end, they turned out to be this really unique, and handmade, personal element to our wedding.