Shotgun Wedding!

Okay - visualize this with me, girls - it's Thursday night, 10:30 p.m., I'm getting ready to go to bed when I get a phone call from my girl Denise (she is our Relief Society President). She asked if it's possible to put together a wedding by Saturday for a couple in our ward (church). (that's 1 1/2 days, folks) She let me know that they don't have any money, it can be something very simple, but something to make the day special. The reason for the haste: The groom, fresh from Marine Corps boot camp, is shipping out on Tuesday for some more military training, so the poor couple wanted to get married before he left in order for her to join him when he's done.

Now this is where most people would panic but I got a surge of electricity through me because this could be FUN! I told Denise that it is ABSOLUTELY possible and this bride better like Fall colors because that's what she's getting! Naturally, I enlisted my girl Kadie and the three of us set to work on making a game plan. Also, there weren't going to be very many in attendance, so that also made this party quite easy.

Here's what we came up with in a couple of hours on Friday:

Food:
Dinner In a Pumpkin (SO good - you have to try this before Fall is over!)
Pumpkin Pie Cheesecake Bars
Chocolate Eclair Dessert
Fruit Trays
Sparkling Cider
French Bread
(Thanks, Jen, for assigning everything out - and thanks ladies, wherever you are, for making, baking, and shaking for us!)

Decor:
Fall, Fall, Fall
Pumpkins
White lights
Dim lighting with lamps
Platters, cake stands, ANYTHING
Whatever we have at home - and between Kadie and I, we stripped our homes of every piece of decor and made the place quite cozy!

(honestly, people, we had to turn a seriously ugly room into something sort of pretty...big task but manageable...)


So here's our ugly gym - and all of our junk.


















Hard workin' ladies - Kadie and Denise









More junk...








Our centerpiece: Floral pumpkins

I spent about $60 on some clearance fall foliage and we clipped everything apart into piles. From there, Kadie and Denise stuffed the flowers into a pumpkin with the top cut off. We didn't have time to clean out the guts - we just stuffed! Normally, I'm sure you'd want to clean out the seeds and such.









They did great, eh?! I also had a bunch of these berry garlands that we encircled around the base of each pumpkin, along with acorns from my back yard. (I paid my kids $1.00 to gather as many as they could...haha!)



And here's our finished table. That tiny little cake in the back is all I had time for! Everybody we knew was either watching kids or baking themselves, so that left NOBODY to do a cake - which is fine. I found a cute little cake at the store, added some flowers, and that's what they got.








And, yes, those are paper plates you're seeing in the corner but don't judge me! We had no budget for cute plates! (besides, they match the decor...)








With a little bit of magic and floral tape, I put together a cake top and a couple of boutonnieres for the men. I'll give a tutorial on that when I get some time. (Heaven only knows that I've got plenty of leftover scraps.)

(The cake top is wet because I had to wash off the frosting...but you get the idea.)







All in all, I spent about $100, maybe $150 (I lost count, actually) on pumpkins, foliage, and a little food.

We all spent roughly 9 hours total on Saturday from 10:00 a.m. until 7:00 p.m. - unloading junk, decorating, ironing table cloths (you rock Denise), decorating, decorating, getting dressed quickly, serving food during the wedding, and then disassembling everything, cleaning the kitchen, then re-loading our vehicles so we could go home. We rock.



Was it worth it, you might ask? You bet it was. The groom, who is a sweet young man in our ward, had no idea it was possible to make the gym look so nice! He was SO very thankful and hugged all of us who worked so hard. We later learned that the couple had no expectations of a nice wedding since it was such late notice.

Great things can happen when we get the girls together! Not pictured are many, many other people who contributed to this event - thanks everyone!