7 Bridges & Pumpkin Centerpieces

Monica left a comment on my answers to the meme regarding where 7 Bridges is located and asking for a photo of the centerpieces from our wedding. So, here you go.

7 BRIDGES:

I first learned about 7 Bridges when my 6th grade class from ECA took a field trip there the last few weeks of school; my family has hiked it many times since. It is so picturesque and a good workout with plenty of great places to stop and have a picnic or play in the river along the way. If any of you are ever in Colorado Springs, and enjoy a good hike, I highly recommend it.

To get there, you drive past Helen Hunt Falls heading up towards Gold Camp Road. Once you go around the hairpin turn by the falls, you'll follow the road until you come to a gravel parking lot. To the west side of the parking lot you'll see what looks like a dirt road, not a trail head. Head down this road for about 1/2 mile or so (this is the boring part of the "hike") until you're about to make a 90 degree turn to the left. At this point, you'll see the beginning of a trail to your right (no trail sign that I recall) and you'll follow it up and to your right for about 50 yards and you'll see the first bridge (2 planks is all this one is). Once you cross over that, you'll head up the small hill and turn left and you'll be at the second bridge. They become a little more spaced out after that. My favorite bridge is 3 or 4. It has a bunch of planks laid horizontally and 2 planks vertically to kind of make a railroad bridge and there are lots of rocks in the river that you can climb on. This is where we normally stop and have a picnic. All in all I think the hike is about 5 miles roundtrip - uphill going, but downhill on the way back. We've taken people of all different ages and fitness abilities on this trail because as I said, there are plenty of places to stop and rest if need be.

PUMPKIN CENTERPIECES:
Now, for the pumpkin centerpieces from our wedding. I'll post the picture now, and then as fall rolls around, I'll post more pictures of the crafty type things I did. I made our invitations, favors, guest book, thank you cards, centerpieces, table cards, place cards, and decor and I had so much fun. I also did all this for my friend's wedding in January, so if I can find some pictures of here things, I'll post them in the summer time because they're beach themed (she got married in Costa Rica so it didn't matter that it was January).

First off, I have to give a big THANK YOU again to my cousin, Casey, because she came out and helped me glue all the leaves on to these pumpkins. What a huge help! The fun part was figuring out how to mail everything to Colorado for the wedding because I could only fit about 5 pumpkins in a box. Thank goodness we got lots of free ones at work!

For the centerpieces, I copied an idea I saw at Michael's and modified it a little. While real pumpkins would have been pretty, they weren't too practical as far as being able to make in advance, or ship to Colorado for that matter. So, I used the styrofoam-like ones that you can find in craft stores for carving around Halloween. I had thought about just doing intricate carvings in them with the table number in them, but then I read that they're flammable, and I didn't feel like buying 21 LED lights, so I nixed that idea. So, here is what we did:

We used 21 white pumpkins, 15 bags of leaves (the cheapest place to buy these was Walmart for $1/bag of 20+), a few bottles of some gold dimensional fabric/foam paint, tacky glue, and green acrylic paint.

Casey applied about 12 leaves to each pumpkin (3 columns of about 4 leaves each) and I painted the stems green. Here is a picture of them once they're finished to this point:

Next, I used the gold paint to add "veins" and curlyques to fill in the blank space.

I then made a template of a pumpkin leaf and cut out 21 leaves on green cardstock. Using a copper/gold paint pen, I added a table number to both sides of the leaf. Next, we wrapped copper wire around a pencil to make the trendils that stick off the top of pumpkins near the stem and leaves. The wire was poked through the leaf and then stuck in to the pumpkin to hold it on.

To give a little height to them on the table, we spray painted candle holders we found at the dollar store antique copper. Unfortunately, it was very windy when the time for our wedding rolled around and the pumpkins were so light so they kept blowing off the candle holders, so my uncle (who took my decor vision and made it a reality...thanks Uncle Scott!) just put them on the table without the candle holders (if we had a hot glue gun or duct tape that might have worked, but we were short on time) and they still looked nice. Here is a photo of the final product before the wind blew it over:

Now, if only I could figure out what to do with 20 of them. Maybe I could sell them on Ebay!?