Rehearsal Dinner Slide Show - We collected old family pictures from both sides of our family and played them on a loop at the rehearsal dinner. This gave everyone funny thingsto comment on and jogged their memories about funny events.
Custom "C" Centerpieces - We went around in circles looking for something elegant and simple that we could do. With our venue being an old ocean liner I looked up photos of the Verandah Grill and noticed that they used to have lamps on the tables. So, we covered inexpensive cylinder vases with velum and dressed them up with black satin ribbon at the top. To really make them ours we printed a light watermarked C on the velum that matched the light watermarked C on our invitations.
Quiz - My old roommate had a great icebreaker at her wedding that i had to use. We created a fun ten question Quiz about us to be placed on the dinner tables. This got people talking at each table that may not have known each other before. This got childhood friend and new friends involved because the questions spanned our whole life. You can see the silver/burgundy quiz way down in the bottom left corner of this picture.
Bridal Party - Jason and I wrote a short paragraph about each of the people in our wedding party. We printed this off on color coordinated paper and left these on the dinner tables for guests to enjoy. We did this for two reasons; te first was to tell the people involved how much they mean to us, and to tell our guests about the amazing people we chose to be in our wedding.
Welcome Packet - We created an easy welcome packet for the guests staying at our venue. We wrote up a quick thank you letter with a huge "Thank You" at the top. We left that visible when we folded the letters. We enclosed important family member's phone numbers just in case someone needed to be gotten ahold of. We folded this letter around 3 local maps that covered the areas around our wedding so that visitors could easily find their way around. We wrapped a purple ribbon around it and it was done. I had a family member get room numbers from the front desk and distribute them to the wedding guests staying at the venue.
Cupcakes - Who doesn't like cupcakes? We chose these yummy handfuls of celebration formany reasons. First, you can most likely cut out that annoying cake cutting fee that the venue charges. You can also bring home your uneaten dessert much easier than a slice of cake. We were also able to have 8 different flavors to suit all of our guests's sweet tooth's! Our cupcake lady also made us a cake to cut so we wouldn't miss out on a cake to freeze for our anniversary.
Cake Topper - Another way to make the day very YOU is to chose a cake topper that represents you. There are many websites that sell entertaining cake toppers that can keep your guests' laughing. Ours looked very normal from the front but had a cute surprise when you peeked around back. the Bride had her hand on the groom's toosh! We set up our cake table so people could walk around all sides and enjoy the view.
Guest Thank You Gifts - We went along with our theme when choosing a gift. We actually debated wether to do a gift at all. Once we decided it was a useful gift or nothing the search was on. My faithful assistant thought up the idea of a luggage tag since we were getting married on a ship. We were set! We had a great promotional code for a gift website and spent little on these cute gifts. People loved them so much that there were none leftover! Some websites even recommend using something like this as an escort card. Preprinting the guest's name on it would eliminate escort cards, if you chose to do those.
Photo Guest Book - We found this idea on The Knot and fell in love. What do you usually do with your guestbook after the wedding? pack it in a box to collect dust in the attic. So, being the ingenious couple we are we knew that would not work for us. We wanted our guestbook to do double duty. Our guest book was full of all of our engagement photos. We had them on white pages so that there was plenty of space to write around them. Now the book lives with our other photo books right in our living room so that we can enjoy it any time!
Sand Ceremony - Having our wedding on a 1930's ship with
ornate wood throughout left us unable to use exposed flames. So, we found the sand ceremony was our best option. Again, not wanting this to sit and collect dust in the attic later we had to get inventive. I found two small vases that we could pour from very easily. Then I found a great hallow candle stand at Pier 1. This was perfect! The sand could live right under the candle in our house forever. We filled the bottom with a little sand before to represent the time we had spent together so far. As we poured during the ceremony we left a small amount in our individual vases to represent us still having individuality. And, we left room in our large candle stand to add sand at our anniversaries as we aged.
Framed Table Assignments - I found this idea on The Knot also. But there these cute frames were actually up on a wall. What venue is going to allow you to put 10+ holes in their wall. Probably none! So, we gathered all of our 8x10 frames and then purchased a few more at the 99c store to round out our batch. We spray painted them all black and easily printed our 8x10 paper with the table number and guests to fit right in.
No comments:
Post a Comment