Weddingbee Blog

Alliteration much?

Part 1: Prettified Pots

I ended up doing our table assignments, um, the week before our wedding—finishing the last of them around fifteen minutes before we left for our rehearsal. This is something I would NOT recommend, as it was NOT fun, at all. I knew I didn’t want to have place cards, just escort cards (if you don’t know the difference—I didn’t—read here), and because I had no idea what to do (at this point, my brain was fried), I emailed my wonderful DOC freaking out asking for advice. She suggested nixing the escort cards, and made my life somucheasier by recommending a table assignment card for each table instead of a card for each person. I decided to go with one of her suggestions for creating the table assignments and high-tailed it over to Jo-Ann’s to pick up supplies. For 22 tables, I ended up buying 22 terra cotta pots of varying size (the cheap ones) and around seven to ten spools of ribbon. Why did I need these supplies? So I could make these**:

**No, our wedding colors didn’t suddenly change to grey and yellow. Because this was a last minute project, I did not have time to take pictures. Fear not!! because I have a tutorial for you below!

Much, better than what they started out as, don’t you think?

Here’s the “how to”:

You’ll also need a glue gun in addition to the pots (for one tiny pot I used about half a spool of ribbon/ ~6’ of ribbon- this sounds like a lot, but it really isn’t). Also, you can cut down on your costs by buying supplies individually/early on and using coupons. I LOVE COUPONS.

Start by hot gluing one end of the ribbon to the pot (picture 1), then pull the ribbon straight down along the side of your pot, holding it on the glued edge, so it doesn’t move around (2). Make sure once more that the ribbon is straight, then place a glue line along the bottom edge of the pot (3) and press the center of the ribbon down first, then pull either side further in and press down so that the ribbon curves to the pot (4). I should also note that I left the ribbon on the spool while gluing it to the pot and only cut after the end of the ribbon was glued to the bottom of the pot.

Repeat steps 1-4 for each quadrant of the pot. I glued the first two across from each other, and likewise with the second two so that there was even spacing amongst all the strips:

Then repeat steps 1-4, gluing two ribbon strips between each quadrant strip:

Do this until your entire pot is covered. I personally like the overall look of darker ribbon because it is less see through, but that’s just me. After the pots were covered, I went back and glued these thinner ribbons using the same method:

In addition to holding table assignments, I think they would look lovely as centerpieces

Part 1.5: Paper Products

I have a secret. Do you wanna know what it is? I downloaded a trial version of Adobe Illustrator, for FREE, 2 weeks before the wedding and made our table assignments, table numbers, and programs using it. (Miss Ribbons made her awesome invites using it too!) To spice up our table numbers/assignments/programs, I bought a vector image from iStock. Here is what our table numbers looked like:

I printed them out on ivory cardstock left over from our table assignments. I bought the cardstock from Jo-Ann’s, which was on sale for 50 sheets/ $2.50. Cheap? Yes! The best quality? Probably not, but they served their purpose well.

I printed out each number twice (front & back of our table numbers). After all 44 squares were printed and cut, I glued each front and back to a ~12” dowel of basal wood (also found at Jo-Ann’s) and then stuck/hot glued them into a half-cylinder of Styrofoam covered with moss. Yes, I admit, this sounds ghetto and since I have no pictures of this process, you’ll have to trust me when I say, THEY DIDN’T LOOK THAT BAD!

For the table assignments, I used a similar vector image to the one shown above in our table numbers, and printed them out on 5”x7” sheets of cardstock, stuck them to ~12” dowels of basal wood, and hot glued them into the center of the prettified pots that were filled with styrofoam, topped with moss. Again, no pictures of this process but I promise, THEY DIDN’T LOOK THAT BAD EITHER.

Part 2: Programs
I used a similar vector image for our programs and laid out each page (4 pages total) in Illustrator. This was so much easier to do in Illustrator than in the crappy version of Photoshop that I have—um, version 7.0 anyone? After I got everything looking good, I printed them out on cardstock. I was able to get two pages per sheet of cardstock and after, some trial and error, I printed on the reverse side also.

The end result? Our 8-page program, only used up two pages of cardstock!

I HAVE ANOTHER SECRET: I was going to cut them all out myself. I’m pretty sure that when I told Mr. Beagle this, he looked at me like I had two heads But I didn’t, because I discovered that Office Depot would do it for around five dollars. Sweet! So after Office Depot took care of my dirty work in around two minutes (that would have taken me, um, several hours), I took home my freshly cut paper to assemble our programs. I hole punched two holes in each sheet and then tied both sheets together with some 50 cent ribbon from Jo-Ann’s.

Want a sneak peek of what they looked like at our wedding?

photo by our wonderful photog: Ashley Smith

Are you doing assigned seating at your wedding? Are you doing anything creative to display escort cards/ place cards/ table assignments?