How to have a {gray and yellow} wedding: table numbers

I have decided to call this series about my behind-the-scenes wedding tips, ideas, and inspirations “How to have a {gray and yellow} wedding.” I chose this name because the inquiries I have gotten over the past year about my wedding have gone along the lines of… “My sister is having a gray and yellow wedding this spring and we can’t find good shoes for the bridesmaids. Where did your bridesmaids get all their fun yellow shoes?” or “I am having a gray and yellow wedding later this year and I was hoping to get access to your Facebook pictures to look through all your photos for ideas.” And the title above was born…

HOWEVER, the tips and ideas I will be posting really have nothing to do with gray and yellow. You can have any wedding colors in the world (or no set colors at all!) and hopefully you will still find some inspiration from these posts.

So here it is. Fun wedding idea #1! But the first thing I must say is that this was NEVER my idea. It was my friend Andrea’s idea (which she borrowed from a blog somewhere I think) and she is really the one who made this project happen. She is the MOST creative person I know and I cannot thank her enough for all her help!

If you plan to have assigned seating at your wedding, table numbers are a must. Now assigned seating can be good or bad. If you and your groom have 400 mutual friends from college attending your wedding, then who the heck cares? Let them sit where they want. If you are having a BBQ buffet or sitting picnic style on the lawn, then clearly the seating arrangements don’t matter (these sound like fun receptions to me!). But if you are like Micah and me, who went to different colleges in different states and had lots of little groups of friends attending from many places (multiple jobs, a few churches, high school, college, etc.) it might be smart to do a seating chart. Because here’s what you don’t want to happen… A group of 4 or 5 people that know each other grab their dinner and sit down at an empty table. A few minutes later another group of 5 or 6 people who are acquaintances are looking for a table. Tables only seat 8. Seats around the venue are now limited. This group of 5 or 6 can no longer sit together and a couple of them must go hunt for seats elsewhere. Not that I am against getting to know new people at dinner. I’m just saying sometimes assigned tables are a good idea and they worked well for us!

So here is what we did for our table numbers… Instead of just putting numbers on each table to direct guests, our table number cards were dual purpose in that they were also CARDS…to Micah and me…that everyone at each table wrote to us. Each card had the table number on the outside, which was cut out with scrapbook paper that matched our programs (and stitched onto the paper – super cute!), and the inside was blank. There were instructions on each table for the people seated there to leave us a note. Then on each anniversary we open the card whose table number matches the number of years we have been married and read what our guests had to say. Our tables went all the way up into the 20s, which means we will be opening one of these cards each year for more than two decades!

This year we read the card from table one, which happened to be where we sat with all our siblings. We got to read lots of sweet words from our brothers and sisters as part of our anniversary celebration.

I definitely recommend this idea as a way to mark your tables in a really cute way on the wedding day and as a fun memory for years to come! From what I’ve heard from friends, I think our guests enjoyed it too. I expect to read some pretty hilarious cards over the next few years…

Here’s what they actually looked like on the big day…

Chrystabel Photography

And here is a close-up of the stitched cuteness by Andrea!

Kind words from our sibs!

*Disclaimer: There are two tricks to this fun wedding idea. First, someone has to be responsible for collecting all these cards after the wedding and getting them to you sometime before your first anniversary, preferably already sealed in envelopes so you aren’t tempted to peak at them in advance. Andrea did this for us and she even numbered the envelopes and sealed them for us with gray and yellow tape because, as I said, she is the most creative person EVER! Secondly, you have to figure out where to keep these bad boys and remember to open them up each year. I thought I would be really good about this until I went to write this post. I wanted to take a close-up picture of the card to show y’all now that we opened the first one, but when I went to grab the box, I could not find it ANYWHERE! Turns out someone accidentally threw the WHOLE box of 20+ cards away in the GARBAGE. As in the big trash can out in my parents’ garage. I don’t know who did it, but THANKFULLY my mom found them in there before the trash went out to the curb last night. They now have a strange scent to them (like lawn clippings perhaps?) but they are safe. Let’s hope they can make it through the next decade or two without any more harm!