DIY Wedding Seating Chart

Wedding seating chart.... what to do?

There are lots of ways to do this. From something really rustic and cool:

I LOVE this! So great for an outdoor wedding!!

Also great for an outdoor wedding! So rustic- I love it!

There are many options and sometimes you're limited with how many tables you have to work with. My friend's wedding has 24 tables! That's a heck of a lot! 

So...can you guess what I made??

Surprise surprise! It's a frame!

I went to Michael's and found these wooden paintable frames that you can customize to whatever size you want.

I got two 28" and two 26" pieces. I don't have a picture of them, but I found a similar one from Sew Much Ado:

Sew Much Ado

These bars lock together (I recommend a mallet) with a tongue and groove joint:

Sew Much Ado

So I originally envisioned this seating chart to be double sided and hanging from the ceiling with clear fishing wire but the venue didn't have a T Bar ceiling and I don't think they would appreciate me poking holes in the ceiling.
Luckily the venue has rentable easels in gold so that was an easy compromise!

I kept going back and forth with different colour combinations: a gold frame, white frame? Seafoam! Gold ribbon? White! Seafoam cardstock? Gold? White? White AND gold!

With the combo finally settled, I bought 1" white satin ribbon and created these stripes:

Life Designed

I pulled the ribbon taut and staple gunned them to the back of the frame:

Life Designed

This project took a bit of measuring and calculating to get the right proportions and positioning and... math is not my forte but I finally got it! =)

I couldn't find gold cardstock that didn't cost an arm and a leg so I just painted the cardstock gold and then printed the names in seafoam on white cardstock. 

Life Designed

And with some double sided tape, the mock up for the bride's approval was complete!

Life Designed

Thankfully the bride approved and here's the final product:

Life Designed

There was a last minute change and 24 tables became 23... so I added their caricatures that her mother in law drew on the bottom right.

I'm finding it super useful to have these caricatures or a logo or something that can be used throughout the decor. Even just using the couple's initials would be fine.

For an added touch, I used the left over felt letters from this past project and put the love birds names on the top of the frame. I had to improvise with the "and" and use an sideways "X". It works right?

I was going to use glue dots to attach the cards to the ribbon but those things are REALLY sticky which is normally a great thing but I needed something less permanent to be able to adjust the cards as I went along (and in case any last minute changes need to be changed).

So I used 3M's double sided Scrapbooking Tape which I love! It's archival, easy to use and unlike the regular 3M double sided tape, it has a film that you remove as you go along so the tape doesn't get contaminated with dust, dirt, etc. 

And when inevitably changes had to be made with the seating arrangements I was even able to peel off the white cardstock from the gold paper without any repercussions.

Life Designed

Transportation's going to be tricky but I'm going to sandwich it between large pieces of foam core and it should hold up just fine.

Pray for no rain in Vancouver/Richmond tomorrow!