Weddingbee Blog

Mama Cookie has not been too insistent on many of the wedding details, except the need for an aisle runner. At first I wasn’t too keen on the idea, after all we are getting married outdoors. But after Mama Cookie showed me this fabulous blue linen she found at Joann’s on sale for $2 for the aisle runner, I was sold. Although Mama Cookie made the aisle runner, I wanted to add a little extra something to it, so I decided to add a “C” — as C is for the Cookies ;).

In order to create the “C”, I used a combination of Adobe Illustrator, QuarkXpress and white fabric paint.The dimension of aisle runner across is 40″, therefore I made the letter 30″ wide. Programs like Word will let you take the point size of the font up pretty high, but won’t let you create the page bigger than an 8.5″x 11″. Although I needed to use the tiling feature in Quark in order to print out the document on my home printer even though it would give me a custom document size, it will only take the font point size to 720 which was not big enough. So, I turned to Illustrator to help me.

First, I created the 40″ x 40″ document in Illustrator. Then I set the font to “Edwardian Script” and “Created an Outline”. This allowed me to use the Scale Tool and size it to 300% of its original size. I saved the file as a .pdf in order to import it into Quark. You can use Illustrator to tile the image for print, but I am more familiar with using Quark’s tile feature than Illustrator’s.

In Quark, I imported my image into another 40″x40″ document. In the print menu, I turned the tiling feature under the layout tab to automatic, and set the overlap to .5″ with an absolute overlap. The result was 18 tiled pages.

To make the template, I carefully aligned all 18 pages and taped them together.

Then I look my Xacto knife and cut out the C.

After I had my template, I loosely pinned the C to the linen. Really quickly, and with very little fabric paint on my brush, I made a quick outline of the letter. As I was painting the first layer, our puppy got very curious as to what I was doing and stepped smack dab in the middle of the wet paint with her paw. Luckily, she didn’t make any more paw prints elsewhere on the aisle runner! In order to cover her little paw print, I just made the line close to the paw print a little thicker. Can you tell?

After a second coat of paint and refining the end of the lettering, the aisle runner was complete!

Are you doing anything to customize your aisle runner?