There were several aspects of our wedding that were DIY (Do It Yourself). The invitations are kind of a DIY – we bought a couple of these kits at Michael’s, but I printed everything myself and assembled and addressed them with the help of my family. There were quite a few other things, however, that were DIY from scratch. I hope to talk about most of them over the next few weeks, explaining how I made them and what the average costs were. The specific projects that we did are as follows:
– the favors
– the escort/place cards
– the photo guest book
– the centerpieces
– the chuppah for the church
– an arrow sign directing guests to the church
First up…
Escort Cards
The final escort cards were not my original plan. Up until about March, I intended to do something like this.
My dad, however, managed to convince me that we wouldn’t be able to fit all the escort cards onto the one poster board that I’d bought and that it would be a challenge to get an easel set up at the reception facility. With that, I went back to the drawing board and after perusing photos on theknot.com, I came up with a brain storm.
Since I was going with the sealing wax and ribbon on the favor boxes, why not continue with that same theme on the escort cards? I did a quick mock-up, loved how it looked and decided that this was how it was going to look.
Materials:
Two large blue poster boards ($2.00 from Dollar Tree)
¾” brown ribbon (left-over from the invitations)
Three sticks of gold sealing wax ($4.00 for a package of 4 sticks from Michael’s)
A seal with the initial “D” ($6.00 from Michael’s)
Gold pen ($2.00 from Michael’s)
I kind of eyeballed the poster board to figure out the size I wanted for the card itself. Once I figured out how big to make them, I traced grid-lines on the poster board with pencil and cut it into strips with scissors. The strips were divided into approximately 3 cards each and each card was trimmed to neatness with a scrapbooking cutting board. (I learned that I’m not so much of a perfectionist, as not a single card was exactly the same size as another – and I honestly did not care as long as they were around the same size and the differences weren’t too noticeable!)
I made approximately 50 of these cards, since we’d invited a total of 129 people, but saved the rest of the poster board in case we needed to make more down the road.
Cards finished, next came the ribbon. I had brown ribbon left over from the invitation kits which proved to be more than enough for all the escort cards. I cut them into approximately 3” strips and, using double-stick tape, attached a ribbon at a diagonal angle on each card.
The sealing wax came next. I used an obscene number of matches on this one as the suggestion of using a candle or a lighter didn’t occur to me until well after the wedding day. Using the sticks of wax, I pooled molten wax centered on top of the ribbon. Before it could cool, I quickly pressed the seal, leaving a perfect mark with a D in the center.
Ta-da!
The only thing left, at that point, was to write the guests’ names on the front of each card and the table assignment number inside. That wasn’t completed until about a week prior to the wedding. I used a sparkly gold pen (found it in the scrapbooking section of Michael’s) to handwrite the guests’ names on the front of each card and a brown Sharpie pen to inscribe the table assignment number inside.
And on May 1st, when the guests arrived at the hall for the reception, they found their place cards awaiting them by the guest book at a small table in the foyer, thanks to the large crew who assisted in setting things up earlier that morning. From the photos that I’ve seen, the set-up was gorgeous and I’m incredibly pleased with how the escort cards came out.
Next up…the favors!