A Tea Party Sunday

When hubs and I got engaged, I didn't really have a plan for my wedding. I was just starting my junior year of college (I know, I know, we got married super young) and was still wrapped up in all the fun of my extracurriculars. Sorority, Honors, friends, the joys and giggles living with three other girls, and just generally being silly were all high on my agenda--wedding planning was totally out of my league. I wasn't one of those little girls who had been planning it my whole life either. Instead, I was planning the twelve novels I was going to write. I was, and still will be, a career woman, you see. My future existence was not wrapped up in who I was going to marry--it was wrapped up in what I was going, and still will, contribute to the world of literature! (Also, we didn't have pinterest back then... four years ago).

Thankfully, I had an awesome wedding planner. She helped with all the big details, and I felt totally comfortable with her, since she was one of my mom's best friends and I had known her ever since I can remember. I knew two things about my wedding: it should be outside, and it should look like a garden tea party.

We hit the thrift stores hardcore. In one afternoon, we scored all kinds of mismatched porcelain teacups, teapots, saucers and extra little things that would feature as the simple centerpieces for my little garden tables. Surrounded by greenery and hydrangeas, they were perfect.

For the past three years, I've had all of these things sitting in a red tub, wrapped carefully by my awesome planner, and waiting for some sort of use. A lot of them still have their savers 99 cent tags on the bottom. In my last post, when I made our little kitchen hutch a lot fancier, I immediately saw the opportunity to give those teapots a home!

But what to do about the teacups? I am holding onto my favorites--for grown-up tea parties of course--but there are so many that I don't want to keep just to keep. I don't want to give them back to savers where they will sit on some lonely shelf, because now they're strangely special to me. I mean, they were there when I got married! How can I just give them up, as beautiful as they are? (Is this the toy-story effect on my generation? Now everything inanimate has feelings...)

The solution, to me, is obvious. They need to be remade into something beautiful and fantastic. They need to go to loving homes. They need... to be pincushions.

I did this with two of these cups about two years ago. I saw the blogs that were focusing on those teacup candles and wanted to re-purpose my own teacups but without all the mess of melting wax and cutting wicks and there are sticks involved and I just don't want to do that. I do, however, love my pincushions, and I have really enjoyed having a classy little pincushion sitting next to my machine, making my sewing time seem extra fancy, even while my creations were falling apart. 

What is really special about these pincushions is that they will be the first etsy product I list in my store. I hope that they make someone else's craft table feel beautiful, fancy, and whimsically feminine--and at least I know they will come into some use somewhere, and not sit lonely in savers for the rest of their little porcelain lives.