DIY [wedding seating chart]

I wanted to share another wedding DIY. J and R asked me to help with the seating chart for their celebration, a 200 person affair. Now, there are a lot of amazing ideas out there for organizing and displaying a seating chart, but when you're dealing with 200 people, you have to get innovative to fit them all in.

Here were our inspiration images:

Pretty, no?

So to get started, we needed a frame. I found one at a thrift store in Virginia- it was tagged for $300, but the woman was willing to take $100 (what??! make sure you're always bartering at thrift stores).   I painted it black like the other frames, using chalkboard paint, so they would all be cohesive. It was relatively easy to pop out the mirror, so that (1) it would be lightweight and (2) we could replace it with something that could hold pins. With a quick trip to Michael's and Joann Fabrics, I bought a tri-fold cardboard board and a yard of burlap. Hopefully you can see what I did in the image below: I kept the tri-fold board folded up so it would be double the thickness, and covered it with the burlap.

 I used a staple gun to pin burlap down around the cardboard.

Once the cardboard was covered, I popped it into the frame. We decided to use gold pins, also from Michael's, to hold the names, which would be written on small tags and hung with twine. The pins were a bit too long, so we (my lovers K and J, actually) cut them down to size using scissors and protective eye wear- very important my friends!

I hand wrote the names using a thin purple sharpie, as their wedding colors were purple and green. We put the table number on the back, as we ran out of space on the front, particularly for the couples where longer names were required.

Spacing was a little tricky, since we had to fit on 116 individual tags (couples together), but it managed to work with a slight stagger.



Here is one image of the full frame, so you get the full idea, though it's obviously incomplete. Hope you like it!