Oh, Prom. I only went once in high school. This year marks the sixth time I've gone in my adult life.
Working in a small high school, I am the Junior Class Sponsor. Our theme this year was "Enchanted Evening," and boy was it enchanting. In years past, we have decorated the ceiling using tulle or gossamer, but this year we thought a balloon ceiling would be something new and unique. I bought a net and we filled it with balloons. It wasn't without flaw, but it was definitely cheaper than filling those 1200 balloons with helium.
What is really wedding-relevant about this post is:
1. After 5 years, it has taught me a lot about planning events. This particular celebration seated 80 students whereas our wedding will be more like 125. For our wedding reception we won't be spending time and money to decorate the walls or have the large theme items, but we also won't get the Friday before to decorate. Most importantly, I've found that the more thorough my check lists are, the more efficient my helpers could be to find something to work on.
2. Flowers! I had been planning on buying our flowers from Sam's Club for the wedding. I have been reading the reviews and everyone had seemed to have positive experiences. So, I decided to give it a trial run with the prom flowers (use someone else's money, right?). I let my Prom Committee pick what type/color they wanted from their website and they chose red and white carnations. They were $52.98 for 100 stems (the price has gone up a little since), so for $106 we got 200 carnation stems with free shipping.
They get shipped overnight and are dried/closed up. I had them delivered on Wednesday since I figured that carnations last a long time and it would give them an extra day or so to bloom. As soon as they arrive, you have to cut the stems and then hydrate them in water/plant food mix. I borrowed buckets from the school to store them in, but 100 stems per bucket did get a little crowded. They started blooming quick (especially in my 80 degree classroom) and the white ones were full by the end of the afternoon. On Friday, I changed the water and arranged them in our vases. We only needed enough to fill 8 vases/centerpieces, but we ended up having enough to fill 5 extra vases.
The whole experience was incredibly easy. I purchased them almost a month in advance online and picked my shipping date. They bloomed well, I didn't have a single broken stem and they were cheaper than any florist I talked with in town. Thus, I'm super excited to order our wedding flowers from Sam's Club now. Adam and I went and got a membership about a month ago to buy the alcohol for the wedding, so this is another way our membership is paying off. Also, if you have a college/university student I.D., make sure to show it when signing up - they give you a $15 gift card to offset the $40 membership price!
Arranging the flowers gave me another round of practice for the wedding as well. At this point, I feel pretty comfortable knowing that I can make the bouquets and centerpieces in a few hours time without too much drama.
And now it's back to my normal life. I took today off work and slept half of it away. I made a spreadsheet of all the hours that we put into Prom. I worked an extra 50 hours over the past 3 weeks and all together we put in almost 300 hours. Wow. It's probably a good thing I haven't made a spreadsheet of all the hours I've contributed to wedding planning!
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