St Peter’s Cathedral – Where Adam & I were married, Oct 21, 2006

When planning decorations for the reception it was important that we included items that would beautify the room, but also items that would be interesting, entertaining or treasured to our guests, and one of the simplest ways was to use treasured photographs as a decorating medium. We used the photographs in a number of ways, and collecting them all was tricky as we had to dig quite deep to attain a few of them, but the result was a display that was not only beautiful and in-keeping with our theme of vintage romantic, it was interesting to guests to peruse our collected pictures and remember people,places and times they knew.

The Key Players: The first set of photos I gathered was a baby photo of Adam, of me, of each of my parents and of each of his. These were each placed in vintage-type frames from the dollar store and labeled little tags that said “Bride” “Groom” “Mother of the Bride” “Father of the Bride” “Mother of the Groom” and “Father of the Groom” in the same font used for all other wedding stationary. These were set on the presentation table as people walked in, beside the board with the escort cards.

The “I Do”‘s that made us who we are: I then tracked down the wedding photos of his parents, my parents and all 5 or our grandparent’s weddings (Grandma Carpenter married again after the loss of Grandpa Shortt). I printed these as 5×7 and inserted into simple black frames, again from the dollar store. I made a small card label for each again, and placed on a display table with some keepsakes we could collect: My mother’s veil and their guest-book, my grandmother’s cake topper and a few other treasures. Everyone has kept something from their special day, and all were willing to pull a little something out of hiding.

The Wedding Book: While searching for the wedding pictures of our parents and grandparent’s I came across many other wedding pictures and it made me think of the shoebox of wedding pics I have at home sent in numerous thanks you cards through the years. I took all the collected pictures that had no home and asked friends and family for more, and included as many wedding pictures of the guests that I could find into a small journal with the picture, their names and the date of marriage and I placed this on the gifts table for people to peruse. It was neat for people to see their own pictures in there and fun when they found an old picture of someone we knew in common. I have kept this book and plan on adding any new pictures we get in the future.

Random pictures: With a little patience and a lot of photopaper (courtesy of Kieran at Henry’s – thank you!!) I rounded up extra pictures and any copies I made for the other projects that did not get used and made a small picture packet for each table. I tried to include cute pictures of the table occupants or perhaps a wedding picture of one of the guests seated there. From what I could see it was a good conversation starter at the tables with particularly goofy pictures or very old wedding shots, and brought back many memories of inside jokes, mischief or embarrassing haircuts. I tried to do this for every table, but there were a couple I was just not able to round up pictures for (friends of parents, for example) but I think they had fun looking at other’s funny pictures.

Blast from the past: I also came across many very old photos of family that I put in an album near the family tree (that’s another project)and almost every family present at the wedding has asked for scans of the precious old photos. Most of them came from Adam’s mom, but I was able to supplement our collections with some neat photos from my Baba, some dating back to when her Dad was young.

So there you have it. Simple ideas not requiring too much skill, just a lot of digging. These project has doubled our collection of memorable family photos, and provided some simple decoration and simple entertainment.

We’ll start with an easy project, but something you need to get started making early since you have to make so many.

For our wedding favours we decided to make coasters for each guest to take home – 2 per guest or four per couple so that even people who came without a date would still have a matching set. We were told that if you have good wedding favours you will have none left over after the wedding and we think we did okay because there weren’t any left for us – I had to make some more for ourselves later.

The coasters we made from bathroom tiles from the hardware store. A box of 75 tiles cost about $70, giving us a final price of about $2 per guest. We bought 5 boxes and tried to carry them home ourselves since we only live across the street. Don’t do that. They are damn heavy. We almost died.

The only thing else we needed to buy was a roll of cork lining. Then came the fun task of cutting 1400 cork circles – one for each corner of 350 stone coasters. It wasn’t as hard as you’d think. I had a cork cutter from work, but a 3/4″ punch would work well – or you could cut grids and use square feet for the coasters.

Here’s where hubby-to-be comes in. You can either use the “if you loved me, you’d do this for us” or “you can either do this or sign all the thank you cards by yourself,” but whichever you choose, set him up with the tiles, some epoxy glue (the kind you mix together – or some other glue for tile surfaces) and the 1400 little circles. It’s better if you don’t let him see all the tiles at once, just keep bringing in more little piles, or else he may refuse at the beginning. One cirlce per tile corner and you’re good to go.

Then you can package them in little bundles of two. I printed little tags (using black chancery font – like I used for all the wedding stationary) and cut lengths of 1″ wide velvet burgundy ribbon. I attached them with antiqued brass eyelets and used the eyelets to string thin black ribbon to tie the coasters together and place them on each place setting. Ta-Dah!

I miss wedding projects. Adam and I got married in 2006 and for the year leading up to the big event there was always a “project” that needed to be done for the wedding, and I loved it. Stuff to be made, stuff to be organized, stuff to be done. Being a DIY-er, I made a lot of the things for the wedding by hand and my darling husband, knowing I can’t sit still and always need a project was content to let me. He helped me design the colours, style and feel of the overall event, but then he let me gallop off on my own.

Anyways, I learned a lot and figured out a lot and thought maybe by posting a lot of the projects to the blog I could pass on some ideas and keep the “wedding projects” going for a bit longer. So, starting this week, I am going to be posting tutorials for the things we made for the big day, as well as some tips and pointers we learned along the way. Feel free to steal ideas and philosophies as desired and, as always, you can contact me if you would like to commission Sixth & Elm to make any of these projects for your big day – I know we’re all creative but sometimes there just isn’t enough time to make it all yourself.