Weddingbee Blog

Description of Problem: The blue chairs at the Manoa ballroom don’t match our black, red and white color scheme.

Alternatives:

1. Status quo (I mean, really, it’s not the biggest problem in the world)
2. Rent or buy chair covers ($5/chair)
3. Use sashes and bows (doesn’t truly cover the blue?)
4. Change our wedding colors to match the venue
5. Figure out something completely different

You can guess what us sewing machines chose.

Chair cover wedding favors.

Oh, it’s not as bad as it seems. Let me break it down -

Mr. Sewing and I are slowly turning to the eco-friendly lifestyle (living near San Francisco can do that to a person). We aren’t total hippies yet, but we’ve started trending. We own a Prius, shower with a bucket to catch extra water, and take our 30+ “green”- bags with us whenever we go shopping. (3 cents off at Safeway for each bag you bring!) That said, I knew we should have something useful for a favor. I had considered donations, or carbon credits, but I just couldn’t do it. Maybe I’m crazy, but I love getting stuff at parties. Especially creative, fun stuff that can be used all the time.

If you type in ’green wedding favors’ in a search, you might end up with a lot of ’tree sapling’ favors. Which is an amazing idea, but not practical for a Hawaii destination wedding due to agriculture laws.

So we’ll be making “green”-bags. They won’t actually be green, but probably black. I’d like to use eco-friendly fabric, if possible.

And these won’t be just any old bags. They’ll be bags made to fit on top of the chair. A chair-covering bag. Blue chairs, you shall haunt me no longer!

To make them festive, we’ll print Mr. Sewing’s family crest (the Japanese word is “mon”) to the front of the bag, and probably put our names/date inside, where it’s not as visible, with the hope being that guests will actually use them after the wedding. A Bible verse would also be nice, hidden somewhere In-N-Out Burger style.

Here’s my print screen stencil trial run:

To do this I printed out the image, and traced it onto a sheet of thin plastic (actually, the plastic from a cover report). I then used an X-ACTO knife to cut out the image. This was extremely hard, and you can tell I didn’t do that great of a job based on the choppiness of some of the lines. X-ACTO knives don’t exactly turn corners so well. And I cut myself once.

After I finished cutting out the image, I sprayed the back of the plastic sheet with sticky tack. This makes the template stick to the fabric. Usually, I’ll place a piece of mesh over the template so the ink flows more evenly (no big globs), but I got lazy this time and just applied the ink (Speedball fabric ink) directly to the template with a spongy paint brush. I peeled the template off, and voila!

His mon represents the Paulownia tree, which is fast-growing and used as a sustainable lumber source. I think it’s a pretty good fit for our bags.

The final product will probably be red or white ink on black bags, placed on the chairs and then tied with a pretty ribbon or sash. I’ll have to find the dimensions of the chairs so I’ll know how to sew it.

I’m contemplating buying a YUDU to mass produce my template. The one I made with plastic is pretty flimsy and probably won’t hold up much longer. After trying several other forms of cheap-silkscreen, like the embroidery hoop and modge podge method, the YUDU sounds pretty intriguing. I have yet to do any real chemical etching, but the YUDU seems like a hassle-free setup.

Anyone else come up with a multi-purpose favor? Or an eco-friendly favor?