Do you remember the totally spectacular Little Mermaid wedding we posted here a while back? (Or maybe you’ve seen it floating around the interwebs in one form or another, being dubbed the “ultimate Disney wedding?”) We here at Disney Wedding Inspiration think that ALL Disney weddings are awesome and worth celebrating, but Jamie and Christopher’s wedding really stands out for their dedication, creativity, and most importantly, courage to have the party they wanted and not what everyone else thinks is “right” for a wedding! MEGA KUDOS TO THEM and to all Disney Wedding couples!
After I shared Jamie’s wedding last year, we had been emailing back and forth and I asked her if she wanted to submit some more details about her wedding. I was so pleased when she said, “YES!” I’m beyond thrilled to be sharing details about their wedding centerpieces, straight from Jamie herself! Some of these are so gawrsh darn creative, and some of Jamie’s personal explanations made me a little teary eyed … yeah, I’m a sucker for Disney magic! I hope you love them as much as I do, and I’m sure these images will totally inspire the next wave of Disney brides out there. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment and I’m sure we can get an answer from Jamie for you. Check back over the next few days for more of Jamie’s Disney wedding centerpieces, and if you really can’t wait to see more Disney wedding goodness from Jamie, please check out her blog littledisneymermaid.blogspot.com.
But enough chatter from me – please welcome Jamie to the blog! *wild applause*
We knew we wanted to do something fun with our centerpieces, but we never imagined that we would go this route at first! We figured we would just come up with one centerpiece that we really liked and repeat it on all of the tables…easy peasy. We did know that we wanted to take some inspiration from Disney World when naming our tables. At Disney Parks, their parking lots all have fun names (like Aladdin and Goofy and such), and we really liked the idea of giving our tables names based on Disney movies instead of having people sit at “table one, table two” etc. It was a combination of this decision and not being able to find one universal centerpiece that we loved that led us to the decision to create centerpieces based on each film!
The first thing that we did was sit down and list each and every Disney movie that we could possibly think of. Then, we did some calculations and tried to estimate just how many tables that we would need. We went through and nixed many of the Disney movies that we didn’t have ideas for right away, or that we couldn’t see an immediate way to make a centerpiece for…for example, while we may love “The Hunchback of Notre Dame“, we couldn’t think of a way to make a centerpiece that would translate easily (although I am CERTAIN that there is someone out there who could!)
We had ideas for more tables than we ended up needing, so we had to nix a couple more that we really loved and had fun ideas for (such as Mary Poppins…we were going to have a carpet bag with an umbrella sticking out, or Lady and the Tramp, we were going to have a checkered tablecloth and picnic basket with LED candles, and many more!). In the end, though, we made sure that all of our favorite films were the ones that stayed. Tangled, Brave, and Wreck it Ralph had not even been released yet when we started planning, which is a bummer because those would have been so fun to include and come up with ideas for (Wreck it Ralph especially…can you imagine all of the fun “Sugar Rush” centerpieces you could come up with!?)
When we had all of the films we wanted, we sat down and came up with a centerpiece idea for each one of them. Some of them were really, REALLY easy (I think Beauty and the Beast was the easiest to come up with, as well as being my favorite centerpiece) while some of them were a bit more challenging (The Lion King .. .ugh. But we had to include it, because it was one of our favorite childhood movies!) Then came the really hard part…coming up with a list of every single item we were going to need to put the centerpieces together. Luckily, my groom Christopher is a MASTER of spreadsheets…otherwise I don’t know what we would have done! From there we set out to gather and create all of our materials. We gave ourselves a budget of $20 a table, and I am happy to say that, in most instances, we were able to come in under that budget (we shopped almost exclusively at JoAnn Fabric, Hobby Lobby, and Michael’s, and we used SO MANY COUPONS! It also helped that I worked at JoAnn at the time and got an employee discount!). [Ed note – Jamie, where were you when I was making my own projects for our wedding and was visiting JoAnns every weekend?!? haha]
When coming up with ideas for the centerpieces, we tried to incorporate four elements into each one…a main centerpiece, a base for it to sit on, some sort of light or illumination, and some sort of “table scatter.” We deviated every now and again, but for the most part that was the formula we tried to stick to.
So, without further ado…this is what we came up with! (All photos by Shari Photography.)
Table #1: Beauty and the Beast. This centerpiece was my absolute favorite. Our inspiration was the magical rose in Beast’s castle. We found a glass dome at Hobby Lobby, and Chris drilled a hole in the wooden base so that the rose would stand straight up. I’m so sad that we don’t have a better photo of this one … You can get the general idea, though. For the table marker we cut out Belle’s magic mirror with my Cricut machine, and for illumination we had 4 LED candles arranged around the base. We put a light inside the rose, so it glowed as well. The scatter was the rose petals. This centerpiece was a dream come true for me in particular, because I have wanted something like this since I was a little kid. Needless to say, we kept this one to display in our apartment.
Table #2: Toy Story. For the Toy Story centerpiece, we decided to use a Scrabble board as the base and the scatter. This was Christopher’s idea, and had special meaning for him because he and his mother have always played Scrabble together and have a Scrabble score sheet more than a decade long. We spelled out words like “Love” and “Forever”, and at Chris’s request (as a joke for his mom) we also spelled out “SON WINS”. We found a large wooden alphabet block at Hobby Lobby that opened up and was hollow inside, so I painted it primary colors and we filled it with toys that we had loved as children, as well as toys that appear in the movie. We had a Mr. Potato Head, a Slinky Dog (borrowed from my Maid of Honor), a Barbie, some Star Wars Legos, and some little police men because we couldn’t find army men in time, haha! The table marker was a toy train.
Table #3: Mulan. I would say that the Mulan table was the most “traditional” of our centerpieces, meaning it looked a lot like a centerpiece you might see at another wedding. We were inspired by Mulan’s garden in the film. We filled three tall glass cylinders with smooth stones and water, and sunk flowers down in the bottom with fishing weights. These sat on a bamboo mat, and had floating candles in them. In front we displayed a Chinese silk fan, and the table marker was in the shape of Mulan’s parasol.
Table #4: Pirates of the Caribbean. This one was so, so much fun to make and gather the materials for. We were originally going to have a map of the Caribbean as the base, but I just happened upon one at JoAnn Fabrics…it was a perfectly square bandana with a Pirate Map of the Caribbean printed on it, so it was perfect! On top of that we placed a small treasure chest, which had originally been a jewelry box that we found at a local antique store. We filled with all sorts of coins, gems, pearls, etc. For lighting we had a couple of bottles of sand that had lights sitting on top of the sand…we liked the bottles because they came with skeleton keys tied around the necks. For the scatter, we used replicas of authentic pirate coins that we purchased online. They are really heavy and substantial, so they were a really neat addition to the table! We love the Pirates movies, but more importantly “Pirates” is our favorite ride at both Disney World and Disneyland. 🙂 The table marker was shaped like an anchor.
Table #5: Cars. For the Cars table, I bought a yard of checkered fabric from the store and serged it into a square for the base. We bought a little racing kit and put that in the center, flanked by little figures of ‘Mater and Lightning McQueen. This was one of several tables where we utilized “Aquagems” aqua beads. When you buy them they are just little tiny dots, and then you add water and they absorb the water and grow in size. They are fun and squishy and look really cool with lights inside of them. For this table, we used three different colored Aquagems (red, yellow, and green) to look like stop lights. We lit up the green in one of them, and the red in the other, for stop and go. Since the Aquagems remain wet, we did have to use “submersible” LED lights which can be purchased at pretty much any craft store. The table marker was shaped like…what else? A car!
Table #6: Monsters, Inc. For this one, we wanted to try to recreate the door in Boo’s bedroom. We bought a black shadow box from the craft store, and I painted it pink with flowers on it like Boo’s door in the movie. Christopher replaced the front of the box with vellum paper, and then he cut out silhouettes of Mike and Sully which he then backlit. (I’m sorry we don’t have a more close-up photo!) I painted a small door knob gold and Chris glued it on. For scatter, we used little socks…2319!!!!! The Table Marker was a big capital “M”.
Table #7: Peter Pan. This table was a special one for me. This was the one that my parents sat at. Peter Pan was my Dad’s favorite Disney film growing up, and we’ve always dreamt of going to Never-Neverland together. My parents and I all used to be in a Renaissance Faire together (which was, incidentally, where I met Chris) and we all ran the Fairy area. My Dad played the Elf King, and he used to hand out these little stones to children that he called Dragon’s Tears. I scattered some of those on the table in honor of that, with messages written on them like “Believe”, “Fly”, and “Magic”. We also scattered some pirate treasure (jewels) around the table, but it was green like Peter and Tink’s costumes. In the middle we had a Map of Neverland which I drew on parchment-colored cardstock. Sitting on the map, we had a lantern, like the one Tink is trapped in by Hook in the movie. We cut out Tink’s silhouette from black cardstock using my Cricut machine, and attached it to the inside of the lantern and backlit it so it looked like Tink was inside. We filled the bottom of the lantern with Pixie Dust. The table marker was Peter’s hat.
Table #8: The Lion King. Christopher made a shadow box for this table…I was really impressed with all of the work he put into this one. He somehow cut out the silhouettes of the “log scene” with Simba, Timon, and Pumba using card stock and an X-acto knife. I’m not even sure how he did it … I came home, and he was like, “Look what I made!” and I adored it and that was that, haha! The only contribution that I made to this table was serging the edges of the Giraffe-print fabric to make sure it didn’t fray. We back-lit the scene Christopher had made, and the scatter that we chose was gummy worms … Hakuna Matata!
Table #9: Up. Gosh, I love the movie Up. I cry every time I see that movie. This also ended up being one of my very favorite centerpieces. For this one, we wanted to create the iconic house from the film. I am NOT good with tools of any sort, though, so it was sort of a conundrum to try to figure it out. Enter Jennifer McIntyre, my Maid of Honor. Jenny graduated from the school of architecture at Mizzou and is extraordinarily great at building…well…everything.
What Christopher and I ended up doing was buying a little bird house from Hobby Lobby, and Jenny offered to paint it for us. We thanked her and gave it to her, because Jenny paints things a bazillion times better than I do, haha! When we got it back, it wasn’t the same house. And I don’t just mean because it was a different color. It was now on a little bit of a platform, and had a chimney, windows, curtains, and even a tiny hose coming off the side of the house. She COMPLETELY transformed it. Best friends = AWESOME!
All we had to do was tie balloons to it and drink a lot of grape soda, because we used the grape soda caps as scatter on the table. We also made the little brochure for Paradise Falls from the movie. We printed it on parchment colored paper, and then my Dad drew the little house from the film on lined paper and we glued it on.
Table 10: 101 Dalmatians. We really wanted to have a “Kid’s Table” at our reception…a table where all of the kids could go later in the evening and have games and coloring books and such to keep them entertained if they were bored. The reception hall said that if we were going to have one, we had to provide our own tablecloth. After that, we had the idea to turn our 101 Dalmatians table into the “Kid’s Table”. We had already planned on having a small newspaper square as the “base” of the centerpiece, so we just expanded on that idea and Christopher made an entire tablecloth out of newspaper! We had a fire hydrant in the middle of the table, some lights made out of black and white Aquagems and some graham cracker dog bones as scatter. The kids loved it!