Weddingbee Blog

Ohmygosh, I can’t believe it’s almost 2013!  The year of our wedding!  A big congrats to all of the bees who got married in the lovely year of 2012, but I’m pretty excited about the next set of unique weddings that are on the horizon (even though I used to wish I could have been married in an even year.)  OH the battles you never pick and never mean to share on the internet!

Anyway, I can’t wait to get started sharing all of my updates with everyone, so to start things off here is a little DIY (destroy-it-yourself) done by yours truly!  But first:

Most of the DIY’s for my wedding have been orchestrated and constructed by Sister/MOH Big Eyes.  She is my personal wedding slave craft-er and she did an amazing job on everything.  But these DND signs were my baby!  :)

I’m not sure where I first saw the Do Not Disturb sign used in a wedding but I knew right away that it was something I was going to incorporate into my OOTG (out-of-town guest) bags.  My search began online trying to find templates and ideas for wording where I was fortunate enough to stumble upon a forum where someone had commented about Vistaprint having a deal that included 50 free rack cards.  So to pay it forward, make sure you go to Vistaprint to get your free rack cards too! (Hopefully the sale is still going on.)

For those who don’t know what a rack card is (I didn’t realize that’s what they were called), it’s a long skinny brochure cut of paper that is usually used for advertising, but they are also the PERFECT size for hanging signs off of doorknobs.

Luckily, I was able to design both the front and the back of the card and at first I was completely stumped at what to do.  I thought of using another engagement photo but thought that too redundant.  I thought of leaving the background blank while focusing on fancy/fairy tale type of font but thought that too boring.  And then it hit me, the tartan!  OF COURSE!

So I uploaded the image we have of our family tartan and hoped for the best.  Unfortunately, the website informed me that the quality of my photo wasn’t very good so I was not expecting them to turn out the way I pictured them in my head, but in the end, I think they turned out great!  They’re definitely not perfect, one side looks really shiny, and the colors might be a bit too bright  but I’m so happy I found another place to showcase our tartan.

On the one side I put, “Welcome to Minnesota! We are so happy you could make it!”  We added the name of our family tartan (in case there is any confusion haha) in the bottom right-hand corner which is written as Hislastname-Mylastname personal tartan.

And on the side that will hang facing out on the guest’s hotel room door, I put the standard wording of “Please Do Not Disturb.  We’re still recovering from Mr. and Miss Sword’s wedding celebration.”  And I’m sure most people will be!!  :)  We also added the date of the wedding in numbers in the bottom right-hand corner.

Side note: When writing out our wedding date this past year on save-the-dates, invitations, and whatnot, we intentionally chose to spell it out instead of using numbers because the in the UK they put the day first followed by the month.  For example 04/05/2012 would read as the 4th of May in the UK and the 5th of April in the US.  We decided everyone would know the wedding was in March by the time the actual wedding rolled around, but my apologies to our guests who have to read the date backwards!  Does anyone else need to be aware of this with their paper products?

Since I’m making about 48 OOTG bags (don’t ask me how I’ve come up with that number when not everyone has RSVP’ed yet), the 50 free rack cards ended up being the perfect amount.

The actual crafting or DIY’ing part came when they arrived in the mail to my parent’s house.  I decided against punching a big hole in the top because I thought adding ribbon would be prettier/fancier.

Here are my supplies (I’ve always wanted to post one of these pictures!):

Step One: Find a line in your image (in my case the tartan) as guideline for punching holes at the top of the card.  I used the same spots on each one and it made punching holes take no time at all.

Step Two:  Measure the size ribbon you want after first seeing how low you want it to hang on a door handle.

Step Three:  Thread the ribbon through each hole tying a knot on the side that will not be displayed.  Cut off the excess ribbon.

And you’re done!  I know this craft didn’t need an explanation (or photos for that matter), but I had to share it because I’m proud of my crafting skills!

(all photos personal)

Anyone else making DND signs for their guests hotel rooms?  Did my really extensive tutorial make sense!?!?  ;)