DIY Botanical Escort Cards

This morning’s Pancakes & Honey Breakfast shoot featured several handmade wedding projects, and the team of Suzy from Lily Red Studio, Kelly Marie from Fleur, and Jaclyn Simpson Photography have been kind enough to share their DIY secrets with us! They created several projects – click on the links below to jump to the instructions for your favorite:

I have the cutest DIY tutorial to share with you today!  My friends Kelly Marie from Fleur and Suzy from Lily Red Studio are stopping by to share a fabulous DIY billy ball escort card box how-to with us.  Designed by Tiffany of Chicago’s Soiree Events, this sweet display is so easy and cute, and easily adaptable to any event!

We have another gorgeous DIY project for you today! Rafters of Cedars creates some of the most gorgeous chuppas we’ve ever seen and we’re incredibly lucky that Diana has shared this tutorial on how to create your own monogrammed embroidery hoops. They would be lovely as an accent piece at weddings, anniversaries, or also in children’s rooms.

As I previously posted, our invitations went out last month and we have been receiving a steady stream of RSVP cards. As I was going through the pictures of the assembly process, it makes it look easy. Trust me, it was very intense and not the easiest invitations I have put together! (This is my fifth set of invites designing and assembling) If only I had pictures of the week long prepwork before this day (and yes, it was the entire day!). In the week or so before finishing the invites, my mom stamped the wax seals, I cut and folded strips of paper, printed all the items, struggled with the printer and getting letterpress paper to go through it (I just loved the texture of that paper though!) and mounting the invite to the blue shimmer paper and then to the gold enclosures. Oh yes, and then remounting everything with super glue to be sure it would stay. I think there was something about the dry Arizona air that made the photo mounting squares not work so well this go-around.

Understatement of the year: I feel like I spent a lot of time planning this wedding. But the end result? A day filled not only with people that we love but details that I loved as well!

Once we had all the RSVP’s in, DJ’s mom helped me finish this project. She has pretty, scripty handwriting, much better than my ugly scrawl.

Love these!  Ten Thousand Only is being crafty – check out her paper flower escort cards (and beautiful DIY centerpieces too!) here.

Today’s DIY project is just perfect for personalizing your escort cards – love these adorable tiny envelopes from security envelopes.

Happy weekend dear readers! I hope you had a great Saturday and are going into a warm and relaxing Sunday. We’ll be hitting up the brunch at Whole Foods today for a treat…after a stressful week of planning, we figured we deserved some mimosas and french toast!!

Kelly from So You’re EnGAYged created these gorgeous birdhouse escort cards for her own wedding.  They are cost-effective, whimsical, and completely unique – a perfect combination!

Unique, pretty and yummy?  Check, check and check.  Show your guests to their tables by wrapping candy bars in beautiful paper and affixing a label with their name and table assignment!

Love these little cootie catchers found on the Vintage Glam blog!  Great conversation starters, or you could use them as your menu, place cards, escort cards – the ideas are endless!

Throughout the planning process, I mentioned before that I wanted to stay sane and delegate where I could.  That included finding a florist who I trusted to do just about whatever she wanted, letting my parents be in charge of the catering and the alcohol, and letting my bridesmaids choose much of their own outfits.  However there was one thing I couldn’t let go of – I wanted to make the invitations and other stationery myself.  Naturally, that began with Save the Dates.

So, as I said, our theme is based on the mountain woods surrounding our venue and feature shades of green, chocolate brown, and cream, with plum accents. The lobby to our venue has a lot of green and bronze, and we wanted to play up the woodsy theme of our venue with our escort cards.

Created by Inchmark and found via Black Eiffel, these  DIY escort cards are so crafty and unique.

Amanda has a great two-part project for us today.  First up, a beautiful Seating Card Rolodex made from the drawers of an Ikea Fira mini chest.

After successfully completing our wedding invitations, I knew that I could do the remainder of the wedding stationery myself. I designed, printed, and assembled the rest of our wedding stationery using the same process as I did with our invitations. I created ceremony programs, menus, escort cards, place cards, table signs, table numbers, stickers, out of town boxes, and our rehearsal dinner invitations.

Victoria submitted these positively lovely compass escort cards.

One area where we decided we could save money was in all of the print materials. I had a pretty specific idea of how I wanted the final invitations to look and knew we could create a simple look on our own.

At six weeks to go until our wedding, we are starting to really think about and plan all the little details like hotel and map enclosures for our invitations, small ceremony details, escort cards, and programs.  I would like to have some sort of program for the ceremony, but I  a) don’t want it to cost a lot and  b) don’t want it to be too complicated.  An idea that I had was to find an interesting printed paper, and use that for the programs and accent on the escort cards.  Originally, I had wanted something that incorporated both the navy blue (even if it was just touches of it) and the terracotta/orange color, but that wasn’t too Asian influenced.  This was much harder than I expected, so if any of you have great sources for paper with printed designs, feel free to share!!  But, while browsing at my local JoAnn fabrics store, I came across this paper which I thought was really pretty, incorporated the creams and golds we are using, and had a nice saying about the memories we make and keep throughout our lives.