Ocean Wedding.... Inland!

 

   Planning a wedding is always a stressful thing to do, and you always want everything to be perfect.  Here, I will give you some great, simple ideas for an ocean themed wedding.  Hopefully, if this is a theme you are going for, I can make your planning a bit easier! 

   I think the ocean theme is a great one!  Some simple center pieces for your tables could be sand buckets with sand poured onto the table.  (Half in the bucket and half on the table.)  You can adorn the sand with starfish, shells, sand dollars, and even a sand shovel. 

  You can decorate the walk way with old recycled fish nets with shells, glass floaters, sand and starfish as well.  You can hang beautiful shell wind chimes throughout your venue as well as giving small windchimes away as a favor.  They are beautiful, useful, and inexpensive!  Your attendees will cherish them. 

  Don't stop at the venue!  Do your invitations in ocean theme.  Add a smidge of sand to them with a picture of a beautiful sunset over the ocean to tell them of your special day!  When the day arrives, decorate your directional signs as well!  Lets get these folks excited for your wedding!  You don't even have to write on the signs!  Just have big pictures of sunsets and beautiful beach paradises with arrows to follow.  Trust me, they will follow!



   When your guests arrive, lei them and give them a flower for their hair, or shirt pocket.  They can then mingle with others and talk about how nice it is to be in your tropical paradise!  When they are ready, they can find their spot by the creative name tags you have placed on the tables! 

   Some ideas would be to write everyones name in elmers glue on the name tags, and pour sand on them until it dries.  Then simply shake off the sand, and voila!  Sand name tags! 

   You could print the names with different sea creatures on them.  You could even make a game of this by seeing who can guess what their creature is.  Better make them creative, no jellyfish allowed!

   The ideas really could go on, and on, so I will spare you the babble!

   Do you have any other fun ideas?

  

  

Hello Summer Luau!

 

Summer is here, and what better way of celebrating it than with a summer luau? 

  I recently had one and thought I would share some ideas with you!  To start, you MUST have the proper decor!

   Think shell wind chimes, fish nets, leis, shells, sand, starfish, and shrimp kabobs!

My house has an upstairs deck that is accessed through my living room.  So to set the mood for our festivities and guests, I started my decorating outside in the front where people would park.  I hung some nice wind chimes, and also had my boys welcome everyone with an "aloha" and a lei.  They were wearing their Hawaiian shirts, khaki pants and flip flops.  (They were so handsome!)  We asked everyone to wear their Hawaiian style clothing and flip flops! 

   As guests passed through the house they passed a lot of orchids, and bromeliads until they found the bar fully decorated with old recycled fish nets, adorned with starfish, shells, old glass floats and sand dollars.  There were some shells and sand on the bar top as well as some candles.  After receiving their “Blue Hawaii” drinks adorned with flowers and citrus fruit they would meander their way onto the deck where they would choose their seat and mingle.

   The tables had sand in the centers with either shells, candles, starfish, or a combination of a couple.  I also brought out all my tropical indoor plants to give it a more tropical feel!  It was perfect!

    The day was perfect here in Oregon, a rare occurrence, so it was warm, yet a bit breezy.  You could smell the BBQ grilling our sweet and spicy shrimp and vegetable kabobs.

  Along with our Hawaiian kabobs we had a fresh fruit salad, sweet bread, and cream mochi for dessert.

   When everyone was done eating we had some fun dancing, along with a hula dance competition, and the limbo!  For the hula dance, we provided grass skirts which added some fun to the whole event!

   It was a fun evening, and everyone seemed to really enjoy themselves!  I think this may become an annual event from now on!

  I hope you are able to use some of these fun ideas!

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Ocean Bedroom!?!?

  I recently started helping a friend re decorate her bedroom. She loves the serenity that the beach brings, so she wanted an ocean theme. Lucky for her, I happen to have some good ideas every so often, and this was one of those good idea occasions!

   We started with new paint. Her bedroom was painted a flat tan color and since she had only one window it made her room very dark. After what seemed like weeks in the project store, we came back with several paint swatches in light blues to replicate the sky and water of a tropical paradise. We finally settled on a Sherwin Williams paint in "Swimming". It was the perfect mix of light blue but not overly blue or white. This color brightened the room a bunch!

   I also looked through my pictures of Hawaii and found a couple of fun beach ones and blew up my favorite to poster size. I then laminated it and placed it behind an old window and window frame and we affixed it to the wall to give the illusion of a window overlooking a beautiful beach setting. I also had some good pictures I had taken of some of the tropical flowers and fit those to different sized frames and hung those as well. She really liked these ideas, and they really brought some feeling into the room!

We looked at ocean themed decor as well. Such as some star fish, fish net, shells, wind chimes, and we even found some great shell nightlights! We hung the net on the wall above the head of the bed in a half folded, kind of wall hanging way and added some of our new decorations and hung the wind chime in the corner. It all started to look very much like a paradise!

   Then there was the bed. Oh how I hated her bed. It was just so blah. It was a beach themed bedroom! It needed some SPUNK! This is where Craigslist comes in, they have everything! I went on a boat hunt. Not a nice boat, but an older wood boat, just wide enough to fit a queen bed into it. I could cut off the bottom to make it work!

   After almost two weeks of searching, I found it! We did have to cut the bottom a bit but it was worth it! (She wasn't going to get a hammock like I suggested!) We sanded it down, and repainted it a deep brick red color with some similar to the room blue, and then re sanded it for a "worn" look. It was perfect! Now to get it in the room! This boat caused us so much trouble! It didn't want to fit in the door, and the shape of the boat made for a VERY tight fit of the mattress! Either way I won the battle, and the boat lost and it's water days are long gone.

  Plants are one of my favorite things to add anywhere. Not fake silk plants, but real live plants! We headed to the nursery to find some neat tropical plants for the bedroom. After several hours of questions, and heat stroke we decided on some palm trees, and some other big leaf plants. Once placed in her room, they really finished the look off and made it feel so much like a paradise. I just wanted to grab a book and hang out! This really was a fun project and I would love to work on another very soon!