Shame On Them!

This really goes without saying but I'll say it anyway.

When you are a guest at a wedding? Do not steal anything that belongs to the bride and groom. Can you believe I even have to say that? But I do. It would seem that where there's a will there's a way and more often then not things are taken not from a room where everything was put safely away, but in plain view of everyone! The bride, the groom, the guests and staff. On a personal level past experience has taught me that not all guests are to be trusted. Sad but true. One came clean after the fact and even offered to return the item in question. I will say that was a nice gesture but it was months later and quite frankly just felt too late. And of course there is always the chance of a wedding crasher sneaking in to see what opportunities present themselves.

So far at weddings the following items I've made have gone missing:

• A custom, hand beaded bouquet holder for the bride's bouquet

• 2 strands of origami cranes from a set that was 8 feet high

• 3 custom cake toppers

• 1 cake topper sample

How sad is that? I don't know what goes through people's heads when they decide to take keepsakes from a wedding. I seriously can't even imagine how they justify doing it. There is a possibility that 2 of the 3 cake toppers may have accidently been thrown away after the cake was cut but one was for sure taken by a guest (I even did a little story about it on my Flirty Bride website: The Cake Topper Caper), as was the sample taken at an event I was attending when I delivered it to a coordinator I was working with. And those are just the ones I know about. Who knows what else has gone missing. Surprisingly to me all three cake toppers were re-ordered so that the bride and groom would have their keepsake. Me? I've learned to take good close up photos of all of the cake toppers I make so that if they do go missing? I can recreate them perfectly. I even use an enlarged photo, scaled exactly to size as a pattern when recreating the missing toppers.

This was the second topper to go missing:


When it came time for my own wedding I was more then a little nervous that something could be taken. Especially one of the three iPod Video Nanos we used as cake decorations so that we could run slide shows on our cake! Not to mention the beaded shrimp cake topper and decorations I had made. But we had a very happy ending with nothing going missing by the end of the night. Thank goodness! It would have been awful if something had gone missing. But thankfully my friends all helped out keeping an eye on things for me. One even offered to sit next to the cake with my stun gun and pepper spray just in case... LOL

The main lesson here is to make sure that anything that is important to you? Make sure you place them in an area with lots of people around, and arrange ahead for someone to take those items, whether it's your bouquet, cake topper, or origami cranes and as soon as you're done using them? Lock them away somewhere safe and sound.