Weddingbee Blog

It’s time for French Fry wedding recaps!!! Before we can get to the wedding day, though, we have to take a look back. My plan was to have everything done ahead 1 week prior to the wedding, so that when the week of the wedding rolled around, I could relax and mentally prepare for everything that was to come. Thus, the week before the week of the wedding, my day planner looked like this:

(I apologize for the crappy iPhone pic)

Yeah, I’m a crazy list-maker.

And an even crazier list-crosser-offer. But I will say that my plan, for the most part, worked! I didn’t leave a ton of projects for myself the week of the wedding and that left me plenty of time to get everything organized. I had lists for everything: things to drop off at our venue, things to take with me to the hotel, things to take to the church. Every time a thought of, ‘Oh! I need to remember to bring ______’ would pop into my head, I would immediately write it down. I highly suggest doing this, because it meant that I was able to fall asleep at night without worrying if I was forgetting something.

The day of the rehearsal, we had a 10:00 appointment slated with our venue to drop off all of our reception ”stuff”. No big deal… it was only ALL OF THIS (sans my dress, of course):

Yup — that’s the result of DIY-ing 16 tulle pomanders, 13 reception centerpieces, 120 cloth napkins, personalized water bottles, escort cards, dinner menus, candy favor bags, cocktail napkins, frames & decor for the guest tables, bathroom baskets, and about a million other odds and ends. Mr. FF and I got everything loaded into our cars, and we headed to the venue. When our wedding coordinator came out to help us unload all of our stuff, she was amazed at how organized everything was. I had labeled EVERYTHING with a description of what it was, where it should be put out, and how it should be used. This was tedious when I was getting everything ready to go, but I will say… the night of the wedding, everything ended up in the right place!

One of the biggest challenges in organizing everything for our venue was explaining our table setup. We had made fabric napkins in 12 different patterns (1 for each table), and we also had 12 different jars of candy, 1 for each table. Since we were assigning tables for our reception, I formatted our escort cards in Pages for Mac, on plain white card stock. I used a basic business card template, and formatted it with the guest name and then the table name (the type of candy centerpiece that they should look for on the table) like this:

Mrs. French Fries
- Snickers -

So, I had the escort cards down. Next up: the napkins.

I wanted 1 fabric pattern on each table at the reception. So, when doing our seating chart, Mr. FF and I determined the number of people that would be sitting at any given table, and then I selected a napkin fabric, and parsed out the correct number of napkins, menus, and candy bags (for our guest favors) to be set at each table. I pre-folded the napkins and placed the candy bags and menus in them like so:

(photo courtesy MThree Studio)

Side note: anyone notice the bees in that print? It was just a little shout-out to the hive!

Anyway, the reason I did this was so our venue only needed to place them at each guest’s seat. Then, I wrote a note with the correct number of napkin/candy bag/menu sets, and placed everything into Ziploc bags and labeled it as follows: “Table 12 – please set for 10 guests, with Snickers centerpiece” so the staff would know which napkin pattern and which centerpiece went together. I also took a picture of each centerpiece, in case there was any confusion during setup. I think this worked really well — each table was set correctly the night of the wedding, and I know our venue’s coordinator really appreciated how organized everything was.

Oh, by the way… would you like to see all of our centerpieces? Ask and you shall receive. I wanted to keep them a secret until the wedding, which is why you haven’t seen them until now! I will tell you that collecting all of this glassware, and then figuring out how to decorate them and how much candy fit into each of them was a task in itself, but it was so worth it!

I know they don’t look like much on sitting on my futon in bad lighting, but trust me when I say that on the night of the wedding, they looked awesome! Oh, and just for kicks, here are all of our napkin prints (a bit wrinkly after going through the washing machine post-wedding). Rest assured, they were starched, ironed, folded and ready to go the day of the wedding!

Ahhh, I love details. So, we had gotten everything organized and dropped off at our reception venue, and I was confident that our coordinator knew how to set everything up for the next day. I was worry free! Nothing could get me down! Well, except for that pesky weather forecast…

(all photos in this post are by yours truly, except where noted)

Is it your goal to get everything organized before the week of the wedding, or are there certain details that you have to wait to finish?