Weddingbee Blog

I’ve mentioned previously that Mr. Wallaby and I would be providing refreshments that double as escort cards during our cocktail hour. My inspiration was from the ever-creative Martha Stewart Weddings:

Thirst-quenching escort cards from Martha Stewart Weddings

A refreshing seating chart courtesy of Martha Stewart Weddings / Photo by Yunhee Kim

Our drink of choice for the escort cards was Coca-Cola—it looks so classy and retro in glass bottles!—so we stockpiled a small mountain of bottled Coca-Cola over the course of about a month:

So.much.Coca.Cola. / Personal photo

Once we gathered enough bottles for all of our guests, I was tasked with creating “escort cards” with our guests’ names and table numbers. Bridesmaid H had the idea of creating the same small paper tags that match the ones we attached to our favors (tea in test tubes). I happily agreed—the most cohesive-looking weddings keep things simple with just a few patterns and fonts.

So I pulled up the template for the favor tags that I had created in Microsoft Word (I am clearly so techno savvy!) and changed the tea flavors to guests’ names. This took a while—my last name is very often misspelled, so I wanted to be overly careful that I didn’t misspell any names, especially the tricky Persian names. I printed the tags—16 names per page—onto cream-colored card stock from JoAnn Fabrics, I got out my handy-dandy scalloped tag punch from Michaels, and I punched away:

My scalloped tag punch from Michaels. Bless that thing, it’s been through a lot in the last nine months! / Personal photo

I threaded some light pink baker’s twine (also featured wrapped around save the dates, invitations, and favors!—do I sense a theme?) through a small hole in the tag and tied it around the neck of a bottle. Here are a couple photos of my prototype:

A finished escort card / Personal photo

A closeup of the escort card tag / Personal photo

Once I finished tying the tags to all of the bottles, I arranged them in alphabetical order and packed them up to be transported to our venue. We spent a lot of time figuring out the logistics of how the bottles would be distributed—I loved the idea of servers passing them on trays (each tray arranged in alphabetical order…e.g., A through F, G through L, etc.), but I wasn’t sure everyone would pick up on what was going on and find their bottle. It could be easier to just display the bottles on a table in alphabetical order.

Bottles can be pretty lined up in neat rows with pretty paper tags! And stripey paper straws to boot. / Photo by Jonas Peterson via Sugarblossom Weddings

So hive, to anyone else who had drinkable escort cards: did your waiters pass the bottles around on trays during cocktail hour, or did you display them on a table? How did you arrange your escort cards?