Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Place cards and wedding favors

Hey there, 

I hope you all had a nice Christmas and a good celebration of the New Year! As for myself, I've been very busy with family gatherings and catching up with friends. But let that not pull our focus from wedding planning!

At this point, I'd like to talk about place settings. By place settings, I mean the little card that indicates each guest's name and the table they will be seated at for the meal. You may choose to work with a designer, possibly with the person who made your invitations, to print out the seating cards. 
Here is the website of a great designer who will work with you to create the perfect look, from wedding invitations to place cards: http://www.idoweddingcards.com/

I personally had a small wedding and chose to make my own invitations, place cards and wedding favors. If this idea sounds fun to you, you may consider DIY. Of course, be aware that this will take up a lot of time. So if you're only doing it to save money, cursing all the while, you may as well spend a little bit more and get it done professionally, in my opinion.  

The fun things about doing it yourself is that you can really personalize everything, and work with your husband on the look you're going for. For instance, I talked about designs with my fiancé, and then went to an art supplies store. I bought thick (cardboard like) paper, materials such as ribbons and also an assortment of thin papers with designs and colours. We used the same designer paper for our invitations, place cards and wedding favors, to establish unity. 

For the place cards, I cut out little rectangles (3 inches by 7 or 8 inches) and wrote each guest's name in nice lettering. After folding each card in half so that it would stand, I proceeded to decorate it with corners of the designer paper. 

Here are a few links, for some inspiration:  

Now, when it comes to wedding favors, I spent MONTHS trying to figure out what to give my guests. I shopped and shopped online, and then decided to make my own wedding favors. There are lots of great online stores for buying wedding favors, such as the following: 

I hesitated for a long time, because I wanted to give people something useful, which rules out food and a lot of decorative items traditionally used as favors. In addition to that, I wanted something that all guests would appreciate equally, from my childhood friends to my husband's crazy college friends, including my 7 year old nephew and 95 year old grandma. In the end, I think I found a way to make it work. I made bookmarks!

I had lots of fun designing them. Every single bookmark was unique, and people could choose their favourite. I cut out thick, cardboard-like white paper in a rectangular shape. Then, I cut out the designer paper in sections of varying sizes, but always the width of the bookmark. For instance, I had a large square of green paper at the bottom of the bookmark, then a thin rectangle of pink with flowers, then a thicker rectangle of blue with dots, and so on, creating unique bookmarks for each guest. I also added our first names and the date of the wedding, as a souvenir. Here is a picture of the result!

Alright, have a good week, enjoy winter, and see you next week when we duscuss wedding invites!
xoxo

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for mentioning my site on you blog! I wrote about you too on my own blog: http://montreal-wedding-invitations.com/

    ReplyDelete