A Seed Packing Bee
Thursday, April 30, 2009 at 7:08AMAs promised (or threatened, depending on your perspective), this is the first of a couple of posts I have planned to revisit the excellent crafty bits that contributed to the loveliness of my sister's wedding last weekend. These, of course, pale in the loveliness of the bride and groom, but this is a crafty blog, so there ya go.
Anyone who knows me even a little has a facility with the phrase that begins "the best laid plans..." Because, well, I am really good at ideas. And in a vacuum that excludes work and parenting and bathing requirements, I'm pretty good at executing ideas. Sadly, though, Dyson has not yet come out with that model, so my executive skills sometimes take a beating at the gnarled hands of reality.
;)
Of course, a wedding presents the ideal time for one with a gift for overblown plans to go positively Stay-Puft, as I have done for other weddings (evidence to be presented in a later posting--for now let's just say 4000+ tiny white seed beads). For my sister's wedding, though, I wanted to temper my dreams of craft greatness with the important recognition that it's, um, not actually about me. So I came up with a more reasonable project. Or so I thought.
One of the centerpieces of my sister's wedding was to be the poppies that would be planted all over the grounds and timed to bloom just in time. As soon as I imagined my sister and her fiance giving away personalized packets of poppy seeds at their wedding, I was obsessed. I pored over pictures of antique seed packets, researched and arrived at universal standard seed packet dimensions, took up watercolor painting long enough to paint a passable poppy, and got down to designing. After a couple of passes and some very good critiques from my mom and my personal muse, I printed off a sample, cut it out, and folded it up. I was thrilled! It looked almost exactly as I had imagined it. And then. Then I calculated how many minutes it had taken to print, cut, score, fold, and glue the thing. Yeah. That'd be like 12 minutes. Which is no biggie until you multiply it out by 100. I don't know about you, but I am not really in the possession of 1200 free minutes. Pretty much ever.
Enter my mother to the rescue! We had been thinking of having a wee bridal luncheon for my sister the weekend before the wedding. "What if we had a seed packing bee instead? You know, like an old fashioned sewing bee, except we sit around drinking mimosas and making seed packets?" Um. What if I hug you forever? So I whipped up an invitation with a copy of the seed packet set on it at a jaunty angle, and a weight was lifted.
;)
Now, I will say that there were a few people who got our little invitation and wondered what on earth we were talking about. Two confessed to googling "seed packing bee" and hoped we wouldn't be upset that they had not brought seedlings prepped and ready to the party. Mostly, everyone came gamely to the table. Some were inveterate crafters. For others, the corner rounder may as well have been a neolithic weapon. But after the shock of being invited to a party where they were expected to work wore off, everyone got into it and cut and folded and glued and filled their hearts out, all the while catching up and telling tales and taking time to gently rib the soon-to-be-bride. I can't speak for everyone who was there, but for my money, it was a lot more fun than playing dopey games or sitting around opening presents.
;)
And, in no time, the seed packets were fini! All together, I think there were about 11 or 12 of us working for about an hour and a half. Not bad for something that would have probably taken me three or four sleepless nights to get done on my own! And now I want to throw another bee of some kind. But what kind? And for whom?
Reader Comments (4)
"Positively Stay-Puft?" I cannot to begin to describe the excellence in that statement...
You are a genius!
Poppies were a big theme for my wedding - I made crepe paper poppies for the centerpieces...and although I made several dozen of the flowers myself, when I was nearing the end of my rope I had a gathering of friends and family and they finished up the task. We had a blast. The seed packet design you came up with is gorgeous! and it sounds like the bee was lovely as well.
Great post---I love your seed package! My little brother's getting married (at the beach) this summer and I think I'm doing the Super8 filming, but it would be fun to help his GF out with a giveaway like this....what other bee could you do? I don't know, but it might be fun to do something for charity. There's this group that is collecting dolls for children with AIDS in Africa: http://www.uthandoproject.org/ and I was thinking of getting our Etsy craft group together to make dolls in a group. Some of us sew, but others are more into decorating.
If only there was more time. Here's to keeping things manageable and sane!
I like to have cooking bees. I haven't had anyone to do it with in a while, but we used to can jam or make huge amounts of meatballs. It was a lot of fun and would be better with mimosas.