Escort to the Photobooth, Please

One of the best parts of planning an at-home reception is being able to use all the cool ideas you found but never got to use the first time.

Starting with the DIY photobooth. It's been done by many a Bee in the past, but I happened to use Mrs. Pin Cushion's version for a starting point.

And yes, it's possible to fit 10-foot poles in a little Prius. Barely.

I won't bother with our measurements since they were ad-libbed - adjusted to fit our tallest guest and the width of the Ikea fabric we bought. It's pretty cool fabric, actually.

Though I admit we only bought it for Godzilla-type shots:

Rawwwrrrrr!

I also grabbed three red boxes at Ikea to fill with our props. There's a lot of props - what can I say? You'll have to wait and see what sorts of props, considering I don't have them all collected yet. But dinosaur hats are a given, rest assured!

Idea number two comes straight from Miss Glasses and her Japanese snack favors. I bought a couple of cute bento boxes from Daiso, with plans to fill them with our escort cards. I'll get to re-use the boxes later, yay!

For escort cards, we bought 5 cases of Pocky and gave each person a chocolate pack with their name on it.

The nametag will eventually point to the guest's table, where one is free to sit where one wants.

I say, what's the point of all this inspiration if you never get to use any of it? I'm thankful to everyone's great ideas, obviously!

What projects have inspired you, to the point of including them in your celebration?

To Save Your Place

First of all, I'll admit I didn't know what an escort card was until I joined Weddingbee. And honestly, they aren't really crucial to a seating plan - a chart would work just as well. However, like many other things, I became enamored with all the cute ideas and wanted to make my own. And like many other things, Sak rolled his eyes at me, but decided he wanted to be in charge of the Cuttlebug anyway. Such is life.

Though not all our guests will keep their escort card longer than the time it takes to find their table, I wanted to make it a dual-purpose kind of card. You never know, there could be one person like myself that likes to keep everything. Right?

Also, being that we have to either ship or fly all our stuff there, we can't do anything heavy or bulky. We have to stick to paper. And thus, the simple idea of escort card bookmarks was chosen:

I made some boxes in Photoshop and filled them with some pretty screen tones from this website. Then I made a little character using this website. Easy peasy.

Originally, I planned on customizing each character to the respective guest - but that would have taken forever. Plus, Sak wasn't sure what some of his relatives actually looked like. Instead, I made a few different variations - guys and gals with short hair, long hair, no hair, etc. We tried to match them up as much as possible.

I printed them out, in a 2"x5.5" size, though unfortunately it was a little too big for the characters. They turned out rather pixelly. I'm just going to say it should be understandable, since it is a computer game afterall.

Next, Sak cut out the bookmarks and embossed a circle around the name.

And then we backed the card with another piece of card stock. And here is where I must pause, and tell you about the super-awesome addition to my adhesive collection: triangle glue sticks!

This is a must have for gluing paper with right angles. So much easier than trying to get the corners with a round stick!

Anyway, after gluing - I punched hole in the top of the bookmark and attached some ribbon. Taking some leftover scraps of black bag fabric, I cut out some rectangles and stamped the table names on with white ink. It's kind of faint, probably due to the cheap ink I used. I'll have to double stamp these or something.

I punched a hole in the fabric, and tied it onto the end of the bookmark. I chose to keep the table name separate from the escort card in case someone wants to keep the bookmark. I don't think they'd want some random game name written on it. Plus, if I need to rearrange the tables before the wedding, it is fairly easy to remove the fabric name tag.

And we're done!

I'm still trying to figure out how to display these. My initial idea is flopping right now, so I think I need some fresh perspective. How would you display these? And can the place cards be funky and dual-purpose as well, or is Sak-and-team-tent-card right when he says that it would be overkill?