Tissue paper pom poms

Just got the engagement photos from Kelly today (whee!), which were taken over 3 weeks ago, so I thought I'd best get my butt back on this blogging wagon. Traveled, painted furniture, worked, end of quarter craziness, blah blah fishcakes. I did read Miss Manners' Guide to a Surprisingly Dignified Wedding and even went through it a second time to mark up all the things I wanted to blog about. Oh, and I also started the intermediate skirt sewing at Sew Fast Sew Easy so that I can take their advanced dressmaking class.

The traveling was to Michigan, to visit Mama G!! I'm pretty sure this was my first time to the Midwest ever, though my knowledge of geography is so hazy that that might be wrong. I had such a fun and relaxing time; Mama G is the best hostess ever, she had this adorable welcome basket all ready for me, which include an ornament in the shape of Michigan among other lovely smelling soaps and lotions. We went through two watermelons, visited Zingerman's and found foodie heaven, found an awesome curated and cheap vintage shop and...made the test wedding crafty project!

These were made based on the instructions from Martha Stewart. Here's what we learned:

1. The rectangle of tissue paper you fold up should be proportionally longer than it is wide. This is because you'll fit in more folds for the same width, which will result in a thicker cluster of paper.
2. Cutting the edges to be sharper triangles rather than rounded scallops looked better, in our opinion. Not too sharp, though, otherwise the points will flop too much.
3. Again, fluffiness and thickness were important to the point where we thought it looked better to tie together two halves rather try to one big pom pom sphere from the same sheets of paper.
4. Having a gradient of colors really gives the whole thing more depth.
5. Without cutting down the tissue paper, the pom pom ends up looking huge but once you're outside, the big ones look better hanging in the tree. 

This was our favorite one. There are 3-4 different colors here and see how the shape is a bit oval because it's 2 halves stuck together?

I need to scope out how these pom poms will be hung at the venue. I know there's at least one big tree in the yard that's close to the house...but I can't remember others. I also don't know whether we can hang things inside the house itself. As for colors, I think we'll stick to the red-orange-yellow colors. The blue is a bit too hard to find and as Mama G said, I have to be a bit careful that the colors don't veer too much into primary color mode. If I can find tablecloths that are the right blue, that would pull it all together.