Wedding Guest Book

For our wedding guest book I went down an untraditional route, in that I ended up with a wedding guest bag.

The idea came from the tea-towels we used to make at school. It might have happened in your school too. Everyone draws a picture of themselves then they get sent away and printed on a tea towel of the whole school.

Photograph by Paul Summerfield

Being an artist I liked the idea of everyone doing a bit of drawing.
I cut out squares of paper and provided plenty of biros. At the venue, I'd provided a large notice board to be set up on my table easel, with lots of drawing pins for people to display their portrait.

Photograph by Paul Summerfield

It was a lot of fun going through the drawings a few days after the wedding. Not everyone did a drawing and I thought about whether to do their portrait myself, but in the end we decided to just draw Andrew's brother and Nan ourselves so that we at least had all of our family represented.

Once I had all the drawings I scanned them in and edited them as some needed to be a bit darker. Then I arranged them on Photoshop with our names and the date of our wedding in the middle.

I went with the tea towel idea for a bit but then decided to make the drawings into something  I would get more use out of; a canvas tote bag.

I found this Etsy shop to print the bag and sent them the final image of all the pictures put together.

I really love this idea as it's something we'll use every time we go shopping, rather than having a traditional guest book which just sits on a shelf.

Wedding Cards Book

We received some many lovely cards for our wedding that I wanted to do something special with them. I don't remember where I first saw the idea to make them into a book but this was one blog I looked at when I decided to do it.

I gathered together the cards and picked out the shortest one. The really big cards I put to one side and made a second, thinner book with.

I used the smallest one as a template for making the holes to bind the book. I made 5 holes, equally spaced along the fold.

I found it easier to put the fold of the card over a rubber and poke my 'pokey tool' (that's really what it was sold as) through the card and into the rubber. I did this for all of the cards, making sure the template card was in the middle of each card, which I was able to eyeball most of the time.

Next it was time to sew the cards together. A popular method is coptic stitch but I found this video, which is a slight variation on that stitch, which worked for me. Once I'd stitched two or three cards together I started to get the hang of it, which meant I could put Netflix on to help pass the time.

For the book cover I cut the front, back and spine out of mount board and glued them to a piece of fabric, which conveniently matches the colour scheme of our living room.
I also sewed a piece of ribbon to the fabric over the spine of the cover which wraps around and can be tied to keep the book shut.

I glued the back of the last card to the inside of the back cover, and I'd stitched in a blank piece of paper at the start of the cards to stick to the inside of the front cover.

I am so pleased with how this book turned out. I like how it's a streamline solution for keeping the cards and doesn't take up too much space, unlike keeping them in a box or sticking them in a scrapbook.
For the book larger book I made with the leftover cards, I added some blank pages at the front and back which I used to stick in mementos from the day, like one of our wedding invitations and our place cards. I've also thought about sticking photos of our guests to the blank sides of the cards, so there's a lot you could do with this book idea.

Wedding Games

Photo by Paul Summerfield

When planning the wedding, one of the first things we came up with was having games out for guests to play throughout the day. We've been to a few weddings where during that lull between the ceremony and the wedding breakfast it can get a little boring, so we wanted to make sure that didn't happen at ours.

Our wedding venue had a conservatory which was perfect for setting up the games. Although, our wedding day was quite a scorcher and the conservatory got really hot so people took the games outside which worked just as well.

Photo by Paul Summerfield

Here are the games we chose:

Bananagrams, Scattergories and Dobble
These are family favourites and hopefully now many more people's favourites. My bridesmaid Steph has already been out to buy her own Dobble. These games were great for bringing people together, whether it be friends, family, groom's side or bride's side.

Wordsearch tablecloth
My Mum bought this from B&M years ago and we haven't been able to find another one since. It's just a giant plastic sheet with letters printed all over it. This one has all of the countries to find and we supplied crayons to mark them, which meant it could be wiped down to use again.

Coin pusher
Andrew and I are big fans of the 2p machines. We even went to the arcade at the bowling alley on our second date. I can't remember who's idea it was to see if they make smaller versions but we found one on Amazon and had to have it for our wedding.
The machine came with plastic coins but we found using real 1p coins much better. I emptied out my purse, looked down the sofa and, with the help of a friend who manages a shop, had enough coins to play with.

Photo by Paul Summerfield

'Guest' Who
Years ago I'd seen someone had made a personalised Guess Who game and thought it would be perfect for a wedding. I bought an old set from a charity shop for £1.50, which was one of the first things we bought for the wedding last summer. We picked 24 of our nearest and dearest, including ourselves, and I scoured Facebook to find photos of them all. I edited the photos on Photoshop so they were just floating heads like in the real game. I printed, laminated and cut up the photos then slotted them into place. I think it was fun for some of our guests to see themselves in the game and it got handed around serveral people during the day. Two of my bridesmaids used some 'alternative' questions to play like, 'would this person order a lemon and herb at Nandos?' and 'would this person enjoy the surprise aisle at Aldi?'. Not sure how successful that was...

Photo by Paul Summerfield

We also made a quiz for the tables at the reception and people got really into it! We included 20 questions which were very loosely linked to use, like 'Andrew and Lisa went to Seattle for their first holiday. What is the name of Seattle's American football team?'
After the speeches one of the groomsmen read out all the answers and we bought the winning table a round of drinks. It was a great way to get people talking on their table, especially where we'd put people who didn't know each on the same table.

Having the games was such a good idea and I hope it's one of the things that people remember about our wedding in the years to come.

The Bridesmaid's Tambourines

Photo: Paul Summerfield

Not being much of a flower person I wanted to find something different for my bridesmaids to carry. After a bit of searching I settled on tambourines and they were one of my favourite wedding decisions!

Photo: Paul Summerfield

I scoured Ebay and found these ones for £3 each from a seller in China.

I decorated the tambourines with ribbons matching the colour scheme of the wedding; gold and pink. I had some in my stash already but also turned to Ebay again for a few more options, including some that matched the colour of the bridesmaids dresses exactly.

I wanted to personalise the tambourines so I used my wood burning tool to write my bridesmaids' names on the inside.

Photo: Paul Summerfield

The tambourines were so fun and I love that they're a little on the quirky side.
The girls jingled in time to 'Ho Hey' by Lennon and Maisy Stella (from the Nashville tv show soundtrack) as they walked down the aisle ahead of me. They rang out along with the claps and cheers when Andrew and I were pronounced husband and wife. And the girls used them to make themselves known during the speeches later in the day.
The tambourines also turned up on the dancefloor in the evening with anyone that felt like the tunes could do with a little something extra.

Wedding Flowers

Hi guys, I got married!

I've been a bit quiet here on the blog for the last few months as I've been busy preparing things for the wedding. I've got lots of diys to share with you and I'm going to kick things off with...the flowers!

I've never really been that bothered about flowers so I knew it was an aspect of the wedding that I didn't want to spend too much money on. I can understand why florists charge what they do, but I thought this was something I could do myself as I wasn't too concerned about the outcome.

The day before the wedding I headed to Tesco and bought just under £50 of flowers, which is everything you see here. I'd practiced making my bouquet back in May, after searching blogs and youtube for how to do it, so I knew which sort of flowers I was after. 

I laid all the flowers out on a long table and got to work. For a bouquet, the key is to make the central bundle of flowers, tape it together, and keep adding flowers around it, taping as you go.

To make it a bit more special I used some small gold balls on wire, which were originally from some Christmas crackers, and pushed them into the centre of some of the flowers.

I kept the stems long so I could keep the bouquet in a vase of water overnight. In the morning I tied ribbons around it and trimmed the stems right before I left.

I also made the button holes for the groom and groomsmen which was very simple. One small flower with a bunch of gypsophila, taped together with twine wrapped around.

We also wanted a small pot of flowers for each table at the reception which would hold the table numbers. 

For the numbers, I used my Cricut to cut two of each number out of card which I glued together around a kebab skewer. I then sprayed these gold to match our colour scheme.

The flowers for the tables were put in jam jars inside various gold pots. Half of these we already had in our house and the other half we bought from IKEA.

We gave the jars of flowers to our guests at the end of the night, and kept one for ourselves and, over a week later, it's still going strong.

£50 of flowers was more than enough and I was able to make an addition pot to put on the registrar's table during the ceremony, as well as make up a couple of vases of the spare flowers for my Mum to have. She had let me take over her house with my floristry after all.