Weddingbee Blog

I’ve always liked nontraditional table numbers with 3D elements. Two early pictures in my inspiration files clearly illustrate my tastes on this point.

Image via Style Me Pretty / Photo by Hawes Photography

Image via Project Wedding

But no matter what else I found, I kept coming back to that second one. I already had about five picture frames due to my obsessive purchasing from thrift stores and garage sales over the years, and after shopping around for different fabrics and papers, I decided I wanted to go solid, rather than patterned, on the insert.

(Note: I didn’t take photos while making the first five table numbers, so consider this somewhat of a demo photo series.)

I gathered my supplies:

• Hot pink spray paint
• Thrift-store picture frames, same relative size, all with some dimensional interest
• Liquid Nails adhesive
• Scrapbook paper
• Wooden numbers (The example above had already been spray painted a matte white, but they come unfinished.)

And then got to work.

1. Taking the inserts and glass out of the frames, I sprayed them with three to four coats of spray paint in one of our two main colors—hot pink (or, if you’re into catalog colors, “watermelon fuschia infusion”). It took about three to four days to do this in the Florida humidity, as I wanted to make sure each coat fully dried between applications. If it isn’t, it can bubble and peel. Gross.
2. Lightly sanding the edges of the bare wooden numbers, I also sprayed those with about three or four coats of white satin spray paint. Please sand—I didn’t on my first batch, and the results were less than smooth. Nobody but me will notice, but I’m sooooorta a perfectionist. So if you are, too, sand, sand, sand.
3. Taking the “stand” insert of each frame (the part that slides in that has the standup piece on the back of it), I traced around it on the scrapbook paper, cut that piece out, and glued it onto the stand-y part with Liquid Nails, smoothing to get the bubbles out. About Liquid Nails: I friggin’ swear by this stuff—I once used it to hold a 4 × 4 piece of granite to foamcore board for over a year, and it stayed there until I dropped it on cement.
4. I slid the insert into the frame—some of them were tight enough as is, but if there had been a lot of cardboard “filler” in a frame and the insert alone was too loose, I used a little bit of Liquid Nails between the frame and the paper to keep the stand in there. If there was any glue overflow, I just cleaned it up with a toothpick. Something similar would do just fine—an orange stick, a bent piece of paper, yadda yadda.
5. Then I centered and glued down the number with Liquid Nails.
6. Leave to dry, admire your handiwork.

Simple as pie! Now as soon as Michaels decides to stock 1s, 3s, 7s, and 8s, we’ll be golden.

What did you choose for your table numbers?

*All personal photos unless otherwise noted