Weddingbee Blog

This was probably my most intense DIY yet but because I had already decided to do it long before any other amount of planning took place, I started super early. An acquaintance of mine, who is also a jewelry designer, had embroidered her table numbers and said this one thing that stuck in my head—if there are details that are important to you, it’s absolutely possible to do them as long as you start early. I kept her advice in mind and was able to get most of it done at this point (about 3 weeks before the wedding).

My suggestion to any of you who have a really ambitious project that seems almost impossible to tackle is: cut corners where you can without sacrificing the project and then work on it a bit every week. For me, it was about an hour a week for these numbers, 10 to 30 minutes at a time. Basically the length of a TV show or until I didn’t feel like doing it anymore.

If you’re familiar with hand sewing, it actually goes by quite quickly! I didn’t use anything I didn’t learn in 8th grade home ec class.

I used a royal blue linen that was one of our accent colors. In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have chosen linen because of the loose weave is less forgiving if you make a mistake. I should have gone with a regular quilting cotton. I bought a big box of off white embroidery thread from Create For Less. I also bought the embroidery hoops from that site too, since they came in bulk. The size I used was 10″ because our tables are really large and I also wanted them to be on some kind of stand so that they would be much higher on the table, above the flower arrangements, to draw the eye up, rather than have a cluster of things on the table. (This was originally the idea but I hadn’t figured out how they were going to stand up at this point. I’d like to bop 6-month-ago-me on the head and tell her to figure it out right this instant. Because I still have no idea how I’m going to pull this off!!)

Each number was going to be a different font, mostly because I didn’t want it all to be too matchy but also because if I was going to embroider all these numbers, I was afraid that it would get boring, stitching the same font over and over again.

The easiest way to create a number guide for me was to open up a file in Word, go into “Page Setup,”  choose the landscape option, and then type in 3 or 4 numbers. I made them into the font that I wanted and then enlarged them until they couldn’t get any bigger on a single page. I printed them out, cut the number out and then pinned it on the hoop. Afterwards, I just embroidered straight on top of the paper and removed it when I was done.

Some people would have transferred it by using chalk or something but I had about 15-18 numbers to do and I just wanted to make the prep simple. This was one of the places I cut corners to keep the project manageable. I also decided to keep them on the hoops rather than having to mount them on something else (or frame them), also to cut corners.

I don’t know if you all will believe me but this was the most surprising feature of the project: embroidery is incredibly relaxing. Any time I was stressed or frustrated with the planning process, I took out a hoop and started embroidering. After 10 minutes, the repetitive stitching calmed me down and I was able to get my mind off of whatever it was that was upsetting me. This might not be true for everyone but it definitely worked for me!

Did you channel your frustrations into a DIY project too? If it wasn’t a DIY, how did you relieve stress during the planning process?