Hello Readers!
My tip of the week can be very helpful when having a sit-down, plated dinner for your wedding reception, or if you like the idea of assigned seating.
Creating a DIY Wedding Seating Chart can be time-extensive, but can be very inexpensive compared to having a calligrapher or invitation and stationary designer tailor the seating chart. Also, doing your own seating chart enables you to leave room for error (such as cousin Billy letting you know he and his girlfriend will not be able to make it two days before your wedding).
So where to start?
- Sit down with family members (or call, text, email, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc) at least one month prior to the wedding day and start hashing out the details: how many tables are needed, how many chairs, where should the bride and groom sit, where should the wedding party sit, who gets along well with others/who doesn’t get along well with others, which people have common interests, etc.
- Make note that a week before the wedding, the original seating alignment will probably change, so go ahead and tell yourself, “change is ok!” Some guests that rsvp’d that they could come will not be able to come, or some guests will want to bring an additional person. So a week before the wedding, have another “pre-wedding meeting” with family members to discuss seating.
- Go to your local arts and crafts store (Michaels, AC Moore, Hobby Lobby, even WalMart)about a month prior to wedding day, and purchase a sturdy felt board. I chose a black felt board as black was in my color palette and I wanted any other colors that I put on the felt board to really stand out to wedding guests.
- While at the arts and crafts store, also purchase items of your choice for your wedding seating chart like: felt numbers, ribbon, beads, sequins, pearls, rhinestones, craft paper, stencils, markers, craft glue, hot glue gun, super glue (just to name a few). Remember to keep your wedding theme and color palette in mind when purchasing.
- Don’t forget to purchase an easel for the seating chart to rest upon. If your groom-to-be is especially handy with woodwork, perhaps he can craft together a sturdy easel and you two can then paint the easel in white, black, silver or gold to give it a more elegant feel. Also, ebay.com has a nice selection of easels.
- Make sure to coordinate with your wedding consultant or a member of your wedding party as to where the seating chart and easel should rest so that wedding guests can easily view it. At our wedding, our wedding consultant set the seating chart and easel out during our one hour cocktail reception. Before guests moved to the grande ballroom–where the wedding reception and dinner would take place–our consultant moved it to the entrance of the grande ballroom.
- Have a bridesmaid or family member with a creative flair help you with this project. Sometimes stuffing invitations and putting ribbons on programs can be a bit monotonous, so enlisting the help of a bridesmaid with some artistic ideas can be worthwhile.
- Let your wedding theme influence your seating chart style! Some great and free templates for seating charts can be found at:
http://www.smartdraw.com/specials/eventplanning.asp?id=81452
http://www.weddingwire.com/wedding-planning/wedding-seating-tables.html
Stay tuned next week for DIY Out-of-Town boxes!
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I wouldn’t really advise sitting down with family members to plan your wedding seating. It can be a tough task as it is without other people trying to influence who you sit where.
Thanks for the suggestion! Although I wouldn’t advise having family members to have the final say in seating arrangements, I do think it is very respectful and beneficial for the bride and groom to have some input from family members (like who gets along in the family and who does not). With any area of wedding planning, whether it comes down to: venu choice, invitation style, musical arrangements, to even who will be giving the wedding toasts, sometimes family members and friends will not agree with what the bride and groom want for their wedding.
As a wedding planner, I am sure you understand the need for the bride and groom to make sure family members and friends know at the beginning of the wedding planning stages that compromise is very important, as is the vision of what the bride and groom want for their wedding.
If your wedding is small and intimate, sometimes less input will be needed from family members. However, not all weddings are small these days, and some weddings even top over 300 guests. With a larger wedding, the bride and groom might need more help from family members to understand the dynamics of relatives that the bride and groom have not seen in years. For example, a recent friend of mine had a cousin she hadn’t seen in years. If she didn’t ask for help from family members with the seating chart, she would not have known that the cousin had remarried, and the cousin’s ex-husband was now dating a friend of the family. All of these people were coming to the wedding. Thus, the bride and groom needed to know that these wedding guests should be seated at separate tables.
Each bride and groom will choose to plan their wedding differently. Some brides and grooms decide to: take complete control over the wedding planning , others have a wedding planner to do it for them, or their mothers and family members to plan. Also, some brides and grooms plan their wedding and include the thoughts and ideas of others while still moving forward with their wedding day vision. In the end, there will be roadblocks and challenges as you wind your way through the wedding planning stages, but sometimes it is nice to know that family and friends are there to love and support you every step of the way.
great idea – just make sure you don’t leave it all until last minute though as the stress of doing things yourself can put a lot of pressure on the bride the day before the wedding. Make sure its all completed well in advance. Even though the seating plan seems a simple thing to do, you’ll most probably run into problems at the last minute. Usually what can go wrong does!