Making of a Wedding: The Placecard Holders & Table Numbers

The making of the placecard holders for the wedding was a collaborative effort of many people... my mom's plastic canvas wizardry, my dad's die cutting, dh's sanding & baking, my new son-in-law's paper cutting, and the crafting skills of my bff. LOL, it took more people to put these together than any of the other wedding projects!

First, my mom spent countless hours and alot of patience lovingly stitching up over 200 of these placecard holders on plastic canvas. I decided to dress them up a bit to fit the wedding's lovebirds theme.

I created a simple tent style easel made from Bazzill Bling cardstock which I purchased online on sale at Joann's. But because they messed up on my order, the only way I could get the paper in time was to have them send it to dd's address in California. I ended up sending the cutting instructions to dd and my dear son in law cut all the cardstock to size before mailing it to us in Hawaii.

The little pair of pink lovebirds were die cut using an old lovebird Quicktuz die and inkjet printable shrink plastic. We put my dad to work cutting over 600 of these birds on my Big Shot machine, and Dh took charge of baking and shrinking them on cooky sheets in the oven. The photos above show the die cut birds before they were baked and from the oven window while they baked. They curl up as they shrink and finally flatten out in about 2 to 3 minutes in a 325 degree oven. I then colored the them using Copic pens and each bird was glued onto large pearl head pins which dh had sanded down for a flat surface. Bows were made from gold lame ribbon.

Then together with the help of my bff, Aunty Pat, we spent a weekend and lots of hot glue assembling all 280 of these. Whew! Had I known it would take so many of us and so much time to put these together, I don't think I would have even attempted this. Funny how the first sample I came up with came together so quickly...I guess I really need to work on my time assessment skills...

Happily, the table number cards were a lot easier to do. Much quicker to finish too, since I only had to make 30 of them! I used Cricut Design Studio together with George and Elegant Edges cartridges to create a cutfile for these simple tent style number cards.

Up next...the favors...