Fish Frenzy

We have always had a thing for fish. My fiance grows his own marine tanks complete with corals and fish. He loves to eat fish (and sometimes I cook sea bass for him!). When growing up, I learned how to fold ribbon fish so I folded a bunch for him one valentine's day. We have decided to decorate our gazebo with lots of fish due to these 4 reasons:

1) Our history of fish
2) Fish means "plentiful" (good fortune) in Chinese cultures
3) The idea of flowers on our gazebo just never fully appealed to me
4) I found a fabulous origami cranes inspiration picture that could be replaced by fish

Here is our inspiration (we would only copy the pink/purple/blue due to our wedding colors):

Here was my original sketch (please ignore the orange!):

which quickly got shot down by mom who replied to my email with 1 word: "Ugly!"

Sadness. I later learned that it was the big fish that she thought were horrendously ugly. So our latest idea is to only hang strands of small fish on 7 panels of the gazebo (basically everything but the front panel).

We bought a TON of ribbons but in the end, decided to eliminate all the dark blues and dark purples. We're going for a more pastel look. Here are some results from folding fish last weekend:

If you blow up the top picture, you'll see some *tiny* fish as well. We bought 3/8" ribbons for the *tiny* fish but then realized they would be way too small. So we went out and bought 6/8" ribbons for the slightly bigger but still *small* fish. We'll still use the *tiny* fish to hang a few on our tall centerpieces. I have my florist to thank for that idea!

Here is what 1 panel of the gazebo might look like:

The panels in our gazebo are 50" high and 53" wide. We still haven't figured out how many strands of fish to hang in each panel yet. The fish above are mostly still missing tails!

Here is a close up of a fish with a tail. :) Though...we haven't decided 100% on the type of tail we want yet either.