While his suggestion got vetoed, it did sort of pave the way for how we’d be spending March 14th *every year* thereafter. We host a Pi Day Party… honestly putting way more effort into that, than we do our own wedding anniversary! In hindsight, maybe I shoulda just caved on the date

While I appreciate nerdiness/geeking out in almost any form, I’ve always been confused by his obsession uh.. extremely enthusiastic appreciation.. for pi. But then, irrationality in any form tends to get on my nerves (That was a lame pi joke, for the record.. not *totally* a dig at my husband!)

(A bit of explanation for the less nerdy of my readers. Pi Day is the day that celebrates Pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to it’s diameter. You know, 3.14159265358979323.. etc etc. 3.14… 3/14.. March 14.. get it? It’s also Einstein’s birthday. )

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Pi day in the Porterhouse starts about a week and a half before the actual date, with the construction of our own custom “pi-nata”. Yes, a pinata shaped like the pi symbol! Last year, we posted a tutorial – Click here to check it out.

While you may not have the time or inclination to take on such a project for yourself at this time, there are many small, fun things you can do to celebrate Pi Day. I find Pi day is an excellent excuse to clean the house and have some friends over, at the very least. You know… and bake pie.

- Have a pie potluck party! I’ll be making a lingonberry-orange zest pie this year, looking forward to see what everyone else brings – even though I’m going low carb at the moment, and actually behaving myself with regards to being allergic to wheat (sob!). Ah well. I’m sure it’ll all smell good anyway

- At 1:59pm, (again.. 3.14159…), we’ll be toasting pi (and Einstein)… with PInapple punch. Even better yet… this year, we invested in the Pi symbol ice cube tray from ThinkGeek. We’ll have icy little pi symbols floating in the punch, and more used to garnish the glasses. Very Cute. ThinkGeek actually has a bunch of cute pi themed goodies, check them out here

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- Pi Day Trivia! I’d post the link from where I got our questions, but… I know a few of our guests read this blog

- Read off Pi-ku (Haiku with a pi theme!), and then have a pi-ku writing contest. Click here for some examples!).

– Pi Day joke telling. This gets interesting. By “interesting”, I mean the kinds of terrible “punny” jokes that my father in law thrives on. (I’m talking on the order of “What do you get when you cut a jack o’lantern by its diameter? A: Pumpkin Pi!” Groan!).

- Pi Day Sudoku! Click here for the Pi sudoku that managed to fry everyone’s brain at last year’s party!

- Serve pizza. Not only is it ripe for another play on words (PI-zza), it’s round. Perfect. This year, I’ll be repeating my “St Patrick’s Day” pizza recipe that I made last year. This year, I’ll probably get around to actually posting the recipe. Trust me, it’s worth the wait – insanely yummy, and *completely* unlike any pizza you’ve ever tried. Guaranteed.

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– Cookies! I bought this cookie cutter last year. Expensive, but GREAT quality. Love it. May end up using it to cut pie/pizza dough to decorate the other food items, in addition to making pi cookies.

- Get stuff. I had no idea that other people were as obsessed ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H enthused about pi as my husband is, but there must be quite the pi-cult out there – just found this site, and many others. This one in particular has a ton of cute stuff. Maybe next year!

- Of course, recite pi to whatever insane number of digits you happen to have memorized. I consider myself pretty sane at just 10-12ish digits off the top of my own head.. my husband is quite proud of the fact that he used to know 205 digits. Holy crap. If there was any doubt as to the fact that I married the biggest nerd out there, they’re pretty much quashed at this point. One of the things I love most about him though (the nerd factor, not pi recitation in specific!).*

- I got a bit silly with preparations, and used one of the ice cube trays to make a bunch of melt-and-pour glycerin soaps. Not only will there be a set of 4 pi shaped soaps in each of our bathrooms, each guest will be taking home a little 2 piece set, wrapped in a little pouf of cellophane, and tied of with a green (St Patty’s Day!) ribbon. Martha Stewart, eat your heart out!

So… that’s our pi day suggestion list in a nutshell. Do you have any fun ways to celebrate Pi Day yourself? Be sure to tweet, facebook comment, or email them to us.. or just comment here! We’d love to hear about it!

* Plus, I can’t say much. I used to have the entire periodic table of elements memorized. Not just name/symbol, but location, and most of the atomic weights. Ya. I’d pretty much be a hypocrite if I held his 205 digits of pi thing against him

Sure, you can buy some guest books with a pretty or otherwise interesting front cover.. but usually, the insides are all the same. Just lines for information. Although my now-husband and I picked up a guest book with the intent of personalizing the cover… we were thoroughly uninspired by the interior. There had to be a better idea.

Well, when we first got engaged, we started a scrapbook for all of the photos, knick knacks, cards, and whatnot that were associated with our upcoming wedding. Wouldn’t it be great, we thought, if we could incorporate our guest’s signatures into this scrapbook?

So, here is what we did:

We bought several nice 12″ x 12″ pages of heavy white scrapbook paper (the size of our main wedding scrapbook), along with more scrapbook paper in colors to match our wedding color scheme. We cut up the colored pages to add accent color & design to the white pages. We cut out stargazer lilies from some of our leftover invitations, and added those to the mix.

Additionally, we bought metallic silver letter stickers, with which we wrote “Love”, “Devotion”, etc etc.. one on each page.

At the wedding guest book table, we left out the stack of pages, along with gel pens in colors to compliment the color scheme. We had our wedding party each sign a page, “yearbook style”, with whatever they wanted, to get it all started.

Before the wedding, decorating the pages was a fun thing for the two of us to do together.. but AFTER the wedding, it was fun to read the passages, jokes, and well wishes that our guests had left, uninhibited by restrictive lines

It’s also nice to have those included with the rest of our wedding memories, rather than in a boring book, relegated to the back of a book shelf and ignored… as we know would have been the fate of our original, purchased guest book!

Even with my experience… if I had my time back, I definitely would have hired out, just to minimize that bit of extra stress the day of/day before. Would have liked to be enjoying time with the girls the morning of, not running a hot shower in the hotel room to coax some stubborn lilies open! I always recommend to hire a professional floral designer for your wedding.

Sometimes though, it’s just not in the budget, or not what the bride wants to do, for whatever reason. That’s fine.. but definitely requires some planning ahead! Try to design arrangements that will last several days, and pick sturdy flowers that don’t require a lot of special care.

Here is a cute, cost efficient floral arrangement that can be made several days ahead of your wedding! You can use these on each table (and the individual arrangements can double as guest favors!), or just on “special” tables.. the guest book table, etc. The instructions are for the arrangement as pictured – you can use less containers, and do a smaller heart if you’d like!

Per table, you will need:

- About 15 mini Mint Julep cups (plastic looks fine, and is cheap!)
- Ribbon to match your wedding/floral colors
- Floral foam (Oasis) for FRESH flowers (wet)
- Fresh cut flower food/nutrient, prepared in water per product directions
- Clear plastic floral tape (not the paper wire tape)
- 4 or 5 roses per cup
- Tiny filler flowers (we used wax flower)
- Greens of your choice

Before getting started with the actual floral design, you’ll want to prepare your cups. Tape or glue lengths of ribbon around the bottom of each cup. If it suits your wedding, they can be further decorated with rhinestones, etc.. and you can do this well in advance of the wedding.

Several days before the wedding, cut up your Oasis foam into chunks small enough to fit into the julep cups, but big enough to be snug. Soak them in your prepared water/floral food solution, then insert into the cups.

Use the floral tape in an “X” shape across the top of the foam to secure the foam in the cup. The greens will hide the edges of the tape on the cup rims.

Cut your greens into small pieces. Create a small “wreath” of greens around the edge of the cup by sticking the stems into the foam. Allow the greens to hang slightly over the edge of the cup.

Cut your filler flowers into small pieces. Stick them into the foam, creating another small wreath.

Trim your roses to about 3-4″ long stems, cutting the stems on an angle. Carefully stick your roses into the foam. Be careful where you place them – you shouldn’t remove them and reposition after you’ve stuck them in the foam once.

If there are any gaps in the arrangement, fill them with greens, and/or filler flowers.

Arrange the cups in a heart shape, scatter some flower petals on the table, and add some glass votive holders/candles for drama!

With Pi Day (March 14) coming up, my husband and I decided to just go crazy with it. We’ll blog about the festivities later, but for now… I want to blog about the piece de resistance.. our PInata! Neither of us had ever been involved with making a pinata before, and it sounded like a fun – and wholly appropriate – challenge!

This would be a fun project for any couple or family to do together. Or, hey, any pi-obsessed individual… but I will say that two sets of hands REALLY helped it go faster, and there were many times where the extra set of hands helped with handling.

Of course, the principles of design that we utilized in the creation of our PInata could be applied to many different themes and shapes of pinatas, so go nuts with it. If it’s not in the cards for you to make one for this year’s Pi day, consider other occasions that would/could call for a Pinata.

Traditionally, it seems that you’re supposed to paper mache a balloon, and use that as your base. We couldn’t think of any possible way that would fit with our ideas, so we had to Macguyver a solution. Here is what we came up with. (Warning, this will be a fairly photo-heavy blog entry!)

You Will Need:
Styrofoam slab(s)
Large piece of bristol board or cardboard, or multiple pieces taped together
Newspaper
Duct Tape
Flour
Water
Tissue Paper
Ribbon, string, whatever
Stuff to fill it with

My husband had a large slab of 2″ thick styrofoam in his workshop. He cut two 2′ x 2′ squares, and glued them together to make one 4″ thick square. I drew an outline of a Pi symbol, being sure to not only keep the whole thing proportionate, but also make the leg sections wide enough to “hold a lot of stuff”.

He then used both a table saw (to cut the rough shape) and a hand saw (to trim it close to the shape) to cut the shape out of the styro block, then fine tuned the edges with a sanding block.

I then covered the entire thing with plastic wrap, loosely. This was to make it easier to remove our pinata from the mould later on.

A little “do as I say, not as I do”, here: Before you start paper macheing (is that a word?), you should trace your styro shape out onto bristol board or cardboard. We didn’t, and had to deal with some hassle as a result – more on that later.

Then, we made our paper machee “glue” from about 2 parts flour to 3 parts water for our glue, then added a couple tsp of cinnamon because I hate the smell of flour water. It really helped! We cut out newspapers into 1-2″ strips, and laid out some garbage bags as a drop cloth.

For our initial round of paper machee, we did a total of about 2 layers over 1 face and the whole way around our styrofoam shape, then let it dry completely.

We got impatient with it at this point and removed the shell from the styrofoam before adding another 2 layers of paper mache, but in hindsight.. I wouldn’t suggest doing that. Just add another couple layers over the ones you already did, and let it dry completely again.

Flip it over and carefully extract the styrofoam. You may or may not need to let the inside dry some more. Or extract a kitten from it, as we found ourselves doing repeatedly!

Concurrently to all this, you should also be doing a total of 4 or so layers of paper mache to the shape you traced on the cardboard. (We didn’t! We traced our final, extracted shell onto newspaper and layered THAT.. but then it shrank and we had to Macguyver it some more!). This will be the piece that seals off the other face of your pinata.

Another thing we didn’t do was reinforce the holes that would hang the pinata. I’d suggest doing that by figuring out approximately where you are going to cut the holes in the top, and run a bunch of duct tape across it, either from the inside of the top, the outside of the top, or both, then cut your holes. Also, now is a good time to run a length of ribbon or string through those holes and tie off on the outside – it will help you run your string, rope, or whatever through the holes later, as doing so to a finished pinata would be really difficult.

While all of that is drying, you’re probably looking forward to stuffing it and getting this show on the road. We took the time to go to the local Dollar Tree, which was an excellent source of all KINDS of weird stuff to pack into our PInata!

I wasn’t much into the idea of using poufs of tissue paper to space out goodies, so I bought a pack of leis instead – double duty stuffing! In addition to that, we included a kite (because it seemed hilarious to put a kite in a PInata!), candy, etc etc.

Also, we cut 3 or 4 rough 4″ blocks from the scraps of foam that we had cut away from the main Pi shape earlier on, to use as structural support pillars inside the pinata.

When everything is dry, position your foam pillars inside your pinata cavity, then evenly stuff it with your.. stuff. Place the flat Pi shape on top, and weigh it down with something – we used cans of salmon and roasted red peppers, lol. Go ahead and paper mache your way around that whole edge a couple of times, and let that sucker dry completely.

At this point, we were so excited to see the finished product that we forgot to continue taking photos, so I’ll have to just describe how we went about decorating our pinata.

First of all, as it was a combined Pi & St Patty’s Day party, we decided that it should be bright green, and be wearing a black belt with a yellow buckle. We cut up a ton of tissue paper into roughly 2″ wide strips, and then into 2″ x 2″ squares. Then, we drew the lines for the belt and buckle

Using a wide paintbrush and some regular white Elmer’s Glue, we painted the entire back and sides of the pinata with glue, and covered it with a layer of tissue squares. Green squares over most of it, black squares within the lines of the belt. This helped prevent any show-through of the paper mache between the poufs.

IF we were truly smart, we would have either left it like this, or at least done the traditional fringe thing.. but NO. We decided to get fancy, and harken back to our kindergarten days with some .. I have no idea what you call it. Tissue paper pouf. Basically, we took a square of tissue paper, centered it around the end of a pencil, dipped it in glue, and stuck it to the PInata. Repeat with another pouf pretty close to it.. ad nauseum.

Once you’ve got the back and sides covered and they’ve dried, flip it over and repeat with the front, starting with completely covering it with a layer of squares.

NB: We soon gave up on the pencil and just poked out fingers into roughly the center, and then dipped the resulting peak in the glue. While that helped it go faster, it was still a serious undertaking. The back side and sides took a couple evenings, and then the front took another evening..but in the end, it was totally worth it.

Run your rope/string/whatever through the holes, using the earlier ribbon to pull it through, hang it up, and beat the crap out of it. OR, be like us, and refuse to take part in the destruction of your labor of love, and just videotape your friends looking like goofballs

As a closing note, put more thought into what kinds of things will survive the bashing than we did. For the record, pixy stix may result in sugar everywhere. Toys and kazoos may break. Small and compact is best!

Enjoy!