Weddingbee Blog

Before I start, I want to give a HUGE shout out to Mr. Cardigan. Without him, this post wouldn’t be here—I lost all of the photos for this post in the process of uploading them, but Mr. C swooped in and saved the day by recovering every last one. He’s my hero!

This past weekend, we made a trip to Austin to visit some family that was in town. I had a pretty big wedding project that had been on my mind for some time, and I was itching to get started on it, so I asked my dad to help me out when we were in town. What was the project, you ask? Why, it was our table numbers! I’ve always been inspired by photos of those gorgeous wooden table numbers, and I’ve known for a while that I wanted to include them in our wedding.

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So pretty! Of course, this isn’t the type of project that you can take on without some heavy equipment, and luckily my dad has exactly the tools I need! So, on Saturday morning I headed out to their house and we got to work!

We started off with a huge piece of wood that we needed to cut down.

Daddy Cardigan cutting down the wood

Once we had the wood to a slightly more manageable size, we glued on some print outs of the numbers in a font that Mr. C and I picked out (we’ll just sand the paper off later).

And then it was time for me to be introduced to my first power tool. I used a big saw-like thing (sorry, don’t know names of any of these!) to cut the numbers into individual blocks. Look at me go!

Notice the look of concentration on my face? I was terrified!

Then for the numbers that had a hard-to-reach spot (the middle of the 0, 6, 9, etc.), we used a tool to poke a hole so that it was easier to get to when we needed it.

And then it was time for my favorite part: cutting out the numbers! I was pretty scared of this tool at first, but once I got the hang of it, I had a blast. I ended up using this machine to cut out all the numbers (by myself!) while Daddy Cardigan was cutting the more detailed parts, sanding, etc.

Notice the wardrobe change? It’s July in Texas and it is HOT!

And then, the last step (for now): Sanding! We used the same machine as we did to cut the holes, just with a different attachment.

Annnnnnnd…we have a number!

We spent several hours up in the shop cutting and sanding and sawing away, and pretty soon, we had a whole set of numbers finished!

We’ve officially got all of the numbers cut out, and now my dad just has to do some of the more detailed cutting that I couldn’t do and finish sanding them all down. Then we’ll be painting them a nice charcoal gray, and we’ll be good to go!

I’m so incredibly excited about this project, and it’s even more special to me because I was able to do it with my dad—he’s had that workshop for most of my life, but this was the first time I’ve been able to get up there and work with him!

Did you get to try something new out for one of your projects? I never thought I’d be able to say I used power tools for my wedding!