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… in having certain random little wedding planning details on the horizon that strike fear into my heart. Mine? Escort cards. Shudder.
I know exactly where my dread of escort cards came from. About a month after Mr. O and I got engaged, I attended a childhood friend’s wedding with my family. Later, my sister and I were talking about all the behind-the-scenes work that goes into pulling off a wedding, and she said, “Just think about that place card table from today. We spent barely thirty seconds walking up to that table, grabbing our cards, and walking away without a second thought, but SOMEONE had to go buy those little cards, make a seating chart for all one hundred and fifty people, write every single person’s name and table number ON the little cards, alphabetize them all, then arrange them nicely on the table.” Gulp. Ever since that conversation, those damn little cards have been the one particular detail that gives me heart palpitations.
But no more! In my ritual quarterly browsing of Martha Stewart Weddings, I noticed a potential solution to my problem:
We decided to assign seats at the wedding, not so much influenced by etiquette, but by the pretty factor.
So, I created a template in InDesign and copied all of the names of invitees. While it’d save some paper and energy to wait for the full list of replies, I’ve decided getting this little project out of the way was more important. Sorry Earth Day.
I printed the templates onto some lightweight cardstock and revisited my evil paper cutter.
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Previously, I told you about how I was planning to do wine charm escort cards. Many of you shared my concern that guests might think the wine glasses were theirs to keep, so I emailed our venue to ask how much it would cost per glass if our guests accidentally took home the wine glasses and if the venue had this problem before. The venue coordinator emailed me back and basically said I can’t do wine charm escort cards, unless I provide my own stemware. You can imagine how I annoyed I felt! I really don’t want to spend money on 200 wine glasses when the venue already has wine glasses. Also, Mama Jelly and I already made about 75 wine charms!
Wine charm test run.
Alliteration much?
Part 1: Prettified Pots
I ended up doing our table assignments, um, the week before our wedding—finishing the last of them around fifteen minutes before we left for our rehearsal. This is something I would NOT recommend, as it was NOT fun, at all. I knew I didn’t want to have place cards, just escort cards (if you don’t know the difference—I didn’t—read here), and because I had no idea what to do (at this point, my brain was fried), I emailed my wonderful DOC freaking out asking for advice. She suggested nixing the escort cards, and made my life somucheasier by recommending a table assignment card for each table instead of a card for each person. I decided to go with one of her suggestions for creating the table assignments and high-tailed it over to Jo-Ann’s to pick up supplies. For 22 tables, I ended up buying 22 terra cotta pots of varying size (the cheap ones) and around seven to ten spools of ribbon. Why did I need these supplies? So I could make these**:
**No, our wedding colors didn’t suddenly change to grey and yellow. Because this was a last minute project, I did not have time to take pictures. Fear not!! because I have a tutorial for you below!
Featured on Weddingbee
Unique Wedding Favors
“Add a memorable touch to your wedding with unique favors that match your theme.”
I’ve devised a unique way of displaying our escort cards: on a magnet mirror!
I first found this magnet mirror at one of my favorite home decor sites, Layla Grayce:
I did a Google search and up came the same product cheaper at other online retailers… score!
After procuring ribbon, eyelet escort cards from Martha Stewart that I found at Big Lots, and small butterfly magnets that I made, I put together 150 cute little magnet escort cards. They’re currently blank, awaiting names to be written.
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A while back I posted a thread on the boards about whether or not to even have assigned seating. I’m a little concerned about our guests that don’t really know anyone else and might have a hard time finding seats or feeling excluded. BBBUUUUTTTTT I don’t want the reception to feel TOO formal.
The general consensus for the size (roughly 150) and formality (semi-casual) was to have assigned tables and escort cards. This gives the guest just the right amount of direction I think. I really feel like this is going to be a huge project. I need to be very careful about who I seat together. I want the conversations a-flowing right along with the wine!
Since I (probably) came to a decision on this subject, I Googled the crap out of escort cards for inspiration! Chickity check some of my faves:
I LURVE these ones! I like the way the different patterns go together… I could totally replace those with quilt-ier looking fabrics! There’s even a tutorial! (I totally just typed “tortilla” just then… LOL I’m hungry…) Source
Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
In my last post about paper flowers, I showed you this picture:
(yep, the same flowers Mrs. Poodle made a million of!)
After I mentioned I was at a loss for what to do with these lovely flowers for our reception, Mrs. Hot Cocoa pointed me towards Mrs. Bell Pepper’s escort cards and that’s when I knew I had to try it. Escort flowers! Mrs. Bell Pepper made her petals freehand and the part I liked most were the leaves with the seating information.
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Mr. Pencils and I have done our fair share of wandering across the globe. Our relationship has most certainly been defined by these travels together, and when we sat down to plan our wedding, we knew we wanted these to play a part.
Before my junior year in college, I had never left the United States. Mr. P, however, had backpacked through Europe the summer after high school. Once I lived in Rome for five months, I knew I wanted to see more! Mr. Pencils studied in Beijing during that time, and he had such an amazing experience, I knew someday I wanted to go to China myself. So, our senior year of college, we planned a four week trek from Beijing to Paris, with Moscow, Munich, Hungary, Interlaken, Vienna, and Prague in between. We even went paragliding in Interlaken!
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OK, you all convinced me about the assigning of tables. So I’m going to do it. I am a major planner, and I agreed that although I will be stressed creating the name cards and assigning tables so close to the wedding, I will be even more stressed if people are running around trying to find a place to sit. Well, luckily I came across the cutest name card holders from Good Guest on Etsy.
I think they are so sweet, and people can take them home and use them to hold pictures later if they want to.
However, I decided that instead of spending $19 for 12 of them, I am going to attempt to make them.
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So, I was dead set on not assigning tables for the wedding. It felt like a giant stressor so close to the end, and I just didn’t want to do that to myself. But then I read this post on the Weddingbee boards and I started to second guess myself. My problem with assigning tables is if people don’t come to the wedding that RSVPed, the people at that table might feel shunned. And what if people just ignore the assignments, anyway? And what if I can’t figure out who should sit together? OR worse, what if I forget to assign a seat to someone?
Now, I’ve been to weddings where seating is assigned and weddings where it isn’t. I’ve never felt like I was scrambling when it wasn’t assigned, nor did I feel like I had to “mark” my table. I’m just so torn.
On a positive note, there are so many adorable ways to personalize the name cards and table numbers. I did feel sad at one point that I wouldn’t be taking on that task. Here are some ideas that I love:
This was definitely one of the thousands of things I learn by stalking Weddingbee. Since I’ve attended only two weddings in my life and both of them had someone guiding me to my seat, I had absolutely no idea what a seating chart was until a few months ago.
Now that I’ve been drawn into the wedding waters, I’ve found so many cool/fun seating ideas that I had to share my favorites.
This first one was one of the ones I liked the most, because we wanted to give our guests a tiny bottle of Pisco as a our wedding favors. That way we could share with them a traditional liquor from Chile. But since we want to offer the Pisco Sour at the reception, giving them more Pisco might be too much. I love the idea of mixing the favor with the card, though. 
{ Image Source }
Well, one of us is off. The car is packed and I’ll be making my way back to the UP tonight after work! My fiance (that’s one of the last times I’ll get to say that word) will be staying for one more night and coming up on Wednesday after work. The rest of the week will be filled with the projects I couldn’t do from afar, mainly packaging the favors and putting together the OOT bags, final meetings with a few vendors, etc. The decorating at the reception site begins tomorrow as well, so I’ll be checking in now and then to see the progress. Maybe I’ll even post the progress if I have time (keyword: IF)!
Until then, I’ll leave you with a picture of the last project I finished yesterday: the escort card display! Sorry for the terrible picture, but the cameras are already packed so I had to resort to using my phone. The escort cards are finished as well, and they will hang from the ribbons going across the board. Thank you to the lovely Mrs. Quiche for the last minute inspiration and escort card cutting assistance!
If you are thinking, ‘that is one huge escort card board,’ you are right…
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Some of you may have read Mrs. Bee’s post about the craziest vendor response ever. It was totally nuts indeed, but my post isn’t to talk about crazy customer service emails. I thought it would be fun to explain why we needed the punch in the first place.
My friend C needed help with making her escort cards. She had a great idea but she needed a few hands to pull it off. About four of us agreed to help out on a specific day. When weeks passed and the stamp was nowhere in site, C panicked at the thought that she was going to have four helpers at her apartment with nothing much to help with. The stamp was a huge part of the escort cards and with the wedding date so close, it would have been difficult to reschedule another meet up.
In the end everything worked out great, even though it wasn’t exactly what we were looking to achieve.
The original stamp C had ordered was this one:
[source]
Now that I’ve given you the basic idea of our escort cards or place cards (whichever you prefer to call them), I’m still struggling to figure out how to display them. I’m pretty stuck on two options, but please, expand my horizons.
Tied to horseshoes? Believe it or not, a woman in my office donated a bucket of horseshoes to me, knowing I wanted to use them in my decor somehow. She has horses and, unfortunately, this bucket is full of used horseshoes, so I’ll be doing some hosing off.
(source)
I’m completely ga-ga for all three ways, below (in a wagon with grass, in an antique shade, or strung from a clothesline)…
A couple of days ago, Bridesmaid AC was skimming through etsy.com while at work when she came across something she thought I might like. Boy, was she right! I clicked on the link she sent over and, bingo, there were our escort cards.
I’d gone back and forth between doing horse breeds as our table names versus the traditional number scheme. I even dreamt of Mr. CB slaving away at drawings of each breed similar to the horse he drew for our save-the-date. Unfortunately, Mr. CB didn’t feel the same way and off I went, in search of something to suffice.
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