Button escort cards

First, if you are looking for ivory tent cards, let me help you by saying the best you are going to find on short notice are at Office Depot. Unfortunately, getting them means you cannot do an easy Avery mail-merge, so I am going to quickly explain those steps below so you don't want to kill yourself as I thought about while getting this to work.

After printing these adorable cards (in Gatsby font), we decided to add a little extra decor by using the left over buttons from our table number craft.

Here is how they turned out!

And if you need help with the tech side of printing these, here you go! 

1. Make a spreadsheet in Excel that has the names you want on each card so each cell is how you want it to appear on the escort card with the table number in the next column and save it. Make sure row 1 labels the columns as name and table number. (If you want both names on one card, put both names in one cell and the table number in the next column. If you want each person to have a card, put each person's full name in different cells with the table number for each person on the next column.) 
2. Download the template at the Gartner website by using the SKU from your product package. 
3. Open the template in MS Word. 
4. Under the "mailings" tab, click "select recipients". Select existing document and find the Excel document where you saved the guest names. Select the sheet of the document (it is probably sheet 1) where the names are saved. 
5. Select the sample text you want to replace with the guest's name (mine says "John Doe"). 
6. In the mailings tab, select "insert merge field" and select "name" from the drop down. 
7. Select the number 1 where it says Table 1, and from the "insert merge field" menu, select "table number". 
8. Now go up next to the "insert merge field" button and find the "rules" drop down and select "next record". 
9. Format this cell so that it looks how you want it to print. 
10. Copy this cell and paste it to the others in the template where you want the names to print. Delete the other pages in the document. 
11. Now you can preview the results and then print! Each card should have a different guest's name and their corresponding table number for you. 

Button table numbers

Here is the first craft we actually completed a few weeks ago for my sister-in-law's wedding. She wanted to include her husband-to-be's love of art, so we used 6 by 6 pulled canvases painted ivory as a base to glue our button numbers. They will be displayed on cute little 8" easels at each table!

If you are looking for a good place to get a massive amount of buttons, I recommend Little Red Cottage on Etsy. The ones above are sweetpea pink and we ordered 1000 (she was very sweet to do a custom order for us) and had enough to use them here and on the escort cards.

UP themed name tags

My sister-in-law is getting married in 9 days, and the rehearsal dinner is UP! themed. She had a great idea to do name tags with bottle caps, and here is how they turned out:

I am totally excited to see it come together with the other items we have been creating lately!

Craft blocks!

I got the inspiration from this post on Pintrest to display the family photos for my sister-in-law's wedding coming up in just 2 short weeks!

First, I found multiple sized wooden blocks at CraftParts.com. (I used the 5" size since we want to display them at the wedding and want them to be obvious in the space. I would suggest a 3" block for your home.)

Wanting to honor the bride and groom's parents and grandparents, we collected photos of each of their weddings and printed at Walgreens as 5 by 7 photos, and then cut those down to size. 

Some scrapbook paper and a little Modge Podge later, we had all the supplies we needed! 

I did use a friend's Cricut machine for the letters. Then we just printed the couple's names and relation to the bride and groom on one of the colored papers. 

The funny (punny?) part is that I got stuck with craft-block on this block-based project. I was having trouble getting the letters to stand out using such neutral-toned papers. A little black shadow fixed it and they came together really well!