Weddingbee Blog

I’ve been to weddings with different seating arrangements: open seating, assigned table, and assigned seat. We decided to assign tables for our wedding because we wanted to make sure everyone had a place and that our family and bridal party wouldn’t be stuck in the back due to post-ceremony pictures.

I searched the Internet for ideas for the escort cards and came up with a few that I liked:

All images from the Knot

While searching the web, I stumbled upon an Aylee Bits template for a boarding-pass save the date (for a destination wedding) and thought it would be perfect for our escort cards. I downloaded the free template and manipulated the information to fit our wedding. Each guest will have a boarding pass with a destination that matches up with our table names, which are all named for places that we have traveled to together (similar to Mrs. Latte’s cards).

Here are the easy steps that I followed in making our escort cards:

1. Download Aylee Bits template and input our wedding information.

2. Print out the boarding passes, three to a page, on white card stock.

3. Use the handy dandy personal cutter to cut out the passes.

4. Switch out the cutting blade with a perforation blade to make the ends of the boarding passes more realistic.

5. Use a 7.5″ x 8.5″ tracer to trace out the boarding-pass jacket from card stock. Sadly, I could only fit one jacket per page, but to save on paper, I’m only doing one jacket per couple. Both of their passes (since they will be at the same table) will be placed together in the jacket with both of their names on the front.

6. Cut out the jacket using the personal cutter. Make sure you have switched back the blade to the normal cutting blade.

7. Fold the jacket in half.

8. Use another tracer to cut out a portion of the front half of the jacket. (Can you tell I love cheapo homemade tracers? They make it so much easier to keep everything looking the same.)  This will allow for the boarding-pass ends to be seen while in the jacket.

9. Glue the open side and bottom of the jacket together.

Be careful with this step! The first time I glued, I used the whole width of the Xyron runner, but it was too thick and the passes wouldn’t easily fit in the jacket. I learned to only use about half the width of the runner, to ensure the passes would easily go in and out of the jacket. A way to optimize your runner adhesive (since that stuff is pricey, even with coupons at Michaels) is to place two jackets next to each other. This way, half of the adhesive will roll onto one, and the other half onto the other.

10. I printed out the guests’ names on white card stock with a faint gray box around the edges to guide me when cutting.

11. I cut out matting for under the names from scraps of paper that I had saved from other projects, such as our save the dates. Yay for making use of scraps!

12. Glue the name onto the matting and then the matting onto the outside of the jacket.

13. Insert boarding passes, and there you have it!

After showing the mock-up to our planner and to MOH Navy, both looked at the number in the box (I thought it would be cute to use the numbers from our wedding date) and thought that would confuse guests. As in “Wait a second. We’re married, but one is at Table 11 and the other is at Table 23?” So we have changed that section to just have our initials.

I can make the jackets earlier on, but I really have to wait for the RSVPs to start rolling in to complete this project. Note to guests—that means don’t slack on those RSVPs!

Did you do assigned tables? If you did, what did you do for escort cards?