Centerpieces in Crisis

My friend C was recruited to make the centerpieces for an event at our church tomorrow. I was sucked in through association... So I met with C and another friend, B, this afternoon to make 36 centerpieces for a luncheon tomorrow celebrating our Church/Preschool's 30 year anniversary.

Here's the thing about centerpieces though- no one cares about them! Have you ever heard someone say "Did you see those beautiful centerpieces?" after a wedding or other event? You hear about the food or what everyone was wearing, but the centerpieces only come up in conversation if they were incredibly ugly...

So you can see how I am the perfect person to help with these centerpieces, since I obviously place such high value on table decorations.

Anyway- after convincing C that we shouldn't spend too much time or money on them, we managed to come up with an attractive, yet easy, centerpiece idea. At least we thought it would be easy. It involved brown paper gift bags, tissue paper, flowering plants, card stock, and raffia. It seems like an innocuous list doesn't it? Don't be fooled- the raffia is deceptive. How hard could it be to tie a simple raffia bow? The answer is harder than you think! Evidently it's not so simple to create that rustic, yet perfect, raffia bow... Either the raffia bow would turn sideways, the raffia would shred when we tried to thread it through small holes to tie the bow, or the bow itself would completely obscure the name of the preschool that we had printed on the front of the bags.

After spending an hour fighting with the raffia, B, brought out some flower stickers that she had brought from her classroom- where she teaches 3rd grade. One snip of the scissors removed the offending bow and stickers were quickly applied in its place. Problem solved, centerpieces done!

I have to say that they will be really cute on the tables tomorrow... I'm sure people will be talking about how great the centerpieces were all week!