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Candlelight Service:
After we lit our unity candle, the minister explained that we wanted to share our love with our friends and family who'd come to support us.
Lucas and I carried the flame from the unity candle down the aisle, lighting the candle of the first person in each pew. He/she passed the flame down from candle to candle. We were pronounced husband and wife, and the wedding party exited with the guests holding up their candles.
The church let us use the candles and holders they have for Christmas Eve services, but the best place I've found to shop for them is through church supply companies. A few to start with are:
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Votive Placecards:
We decided to use escort cards, becuase I didn't want to dictate exactly where people sat, but we needed to give a little direction. Some people didn't know anyone else there, so I wanted to be sure they ended up with people they could talk to. Also, we had no extra seats, so if a large group arrived late to the reception, we didn't want them to have to sit at separate tables. So we chose to assign tables but not seats.
From the start, I wanted to have lots of candles at the reception, so this seemed like a great idea.
We found plain votive holders at Hobby Lobby for 50¢ each, but we bought them when glassware was on sale for ½ off, so they were only 25¢ each. The weekly sales are available on the store's website, and the glassware sale usually repeats every month or two.
For the paper, we just bought a ream of ivory typing paper from Office Max. The paper is thin enough that the light comes through, but thick enough that you can read the text without it being too bright.
The first step was to design the template for the wrappers. To get the right shape, wrap a sheet of paper firmly around one of the votive holders. Trace along the top rim and bottom edge of the holder. When you unroll the paper, you'll have the basic shape you need. Continue the lines a little on one end to create an overlap. Cut this out and try it on. Make any needed adjustements.
Once you find the right shape, copy it onto cardboard to make a more solid, reusable template. Also, figure out how many will fit on a sheet of paper and how they should be laid out.
Figure out where on a page you should type the names, so that you'll leave enough space to trace and cut the wrappers. Also, figure out how large you want the text to be. You may have to print a few samples before you get the layout and sizing exactly right.
Type out the names and table numbers and print them out. To speed the cutting process, make a stack of 4-5 pages. Trace the pattern onto the top page, and staple the stack together in all the leftover space. This way, you can cut many sheets at once without the pages slipping out of alignment.
Wrap the labels around the votive holders, securing both ends with a small strip of double-sided Scotch tape. Finally, place a tealight in each one!
Use a tealight instead of a regular votive, as the votive candles can make the glass very hot. The tealights will also become pretty hot, so unless the placecards will already be at the guests' seats, do not light them very far ahead of time. They will be too hot to carry!
To avoid this problem, we ordered printed gold and ivory matchbooks from one of the online invitation companies. We put a few on each table, and the placecard attendant let people know they could light them after they found their seats.
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My cousin also used this idea at their wedding a few months later. They had multiple placecard attendants, who lit the candles just before giving the placecards to the guests. However, this did cause a little bit of a backup at the reception entrance. This is a photo of their placecards.
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Printing Invitation Envelopes:
Some hardcore etiquette fanatics frown on printed envelopes, but if they saw my handwriting, I'm sure they'd reconsider!
The following are a few tips from my own envelope-printing experience:
- Order extra envelopes! Most invitation companies will sell you sets of extra envelopes. Order some! My printer decided to act up every once in a while, and we went through nearly all 25 extra envelopes for our 100 invitations. Even if you and your printer get along swimmingly, consider ordering some extras anyway. It's much easier to make typos than to make a mistake when you're slowly writing them by hand.
- You don't need any special software. We just did ours in Microsoft Word. I made a landscape-oriented document and set the margins about where I thought they should be. I printed a sample and then adjusted the font size and spacing. Printed another sample and adjusted more. After enough tries, it will be just perfect!
- Reuse the same envelope when you're setting things up. This was my mother's input, and it was very wise. I readjusted the size and position of the address so many times! When you make an adjustment, go ahead and print over the old version. You know which is which. And when it gets too hard to tell, flip it over and print on the back. After all, it's the same shape! Why waste another envelope if you don't have to? Especially when you might need it later!
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Rehearsal Dinner Invitations:
Click on the images above for a larger view.
Since our rehearsal dinner was to be an Indian buffet, I wanted to give the invitations an Indian look. Since I only had to make around 25, I decided to go all out.
The sari was a thin chiffon-like fabric, so I started with deep red cardstock for the base. I cut the pieces of fabric to be a few inches wider than the card on all four sides. I spread a thin layer of ModPodge (decoupage glue) over the cardstock, centered the fabrid, and smoothed out any wrinkles.
After letting that set for 10-15 minutes, I turned them over and folded the edges in. These were also glued down the same way and left to set for a few more minutes. The extra fabric at the corners was neatly folded down and secured with a lot of glue. I clipped each corner with a clothespin to hold the fabric in place until the glue set.
Be sure to take the clothespins off after an hour or so, before the glue dries completely! I learned this the hard way. After leaving them to dry overnight, I couldn't get the clothespins off without breaking them. The wooden clothespins even left splinters behind! I recommend plastic for this very reason.
The middle layer is gold vellum. To keep it in place on the uneven surface of the card, I glued it down in the center with tacky glue and left it to dry under a very heavy book. Tacky glue on vellum holds well, but it looks very lumpy. However, the top layer hides this.
For the wording on the top layer, I used an Arabian-style font (It was Bavand or something similar). I printed the invitations (two per page) by running ivory cardstock through the printer. Once these pieces were cut, I fastened them to the vellum using double-sided scrapbooking tape (the kind that comes in the little rolling dispensers).
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Photo Thank Yous:
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We wanted to be able to start sending our thank you notes out right away, so we had a family member shoot the photo. That way we could get the pictures back right away and we'd have the negatives.
I forgot to make the signs ahead of time, so they were a very last-minute job. I ended up doing them by hand, sketching the letters lightly in pencil and then copying over them with permanent marker.
We made them out of foam board so that they would keep their shape on their own. This made them much easier to hold!
For the cards themselves, I looked into just having photo cards printed, but most were around $1 per card, and I didn't want to spend that much. I also didn't want to just make them from plain cards, because I wanted them to look a little fancier.
 I finally found some cards at Invitations By Dawn that had a pretty pearl embossed border and little slits pre-cut to hold photo corners. And they were only $20 for 50!
The catalog photo on the right shows the detail of the card a little better, but it still looks much better in person.
The cards fit a photo that's around wallet size. We just took our negative to Walgreen's and had 3x5" reprints made for a few cents each. Then I trimmed these down to the right size using a paper cutter.
We wrote the thank you notes inside the cards and tucked a photo into the slits on the front. To help keep it in place, we secured the back of each one with a small piece of double-sided scotch tape.
I liked that the cards were the smaller size, because I didn't have to write as much to fill them up! Call me lazy, but when you're trying to write 50 meaningful thank you messages, you get a little tired!
We ended up getting lots of compliments on the thank you cards. They were one of the things the guests seemed to like most. Also, the people who'd sent gifts but couldn't attend the wedding really enjoyed getting the photo!
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Layered Programs:
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To make the layered programs, I just created a Word document with all the text. It's laid out to print two copies copies of each program page per sheet of paper.
I printed test runs of the pages on regular paper while I was working out the page alignment. With regular printer paper I could stack the pages on top of each other and hold them up to a light to be sure the bottom page labels were spaced evenly.
Once I got the pages set up correctly, I printed and cut a set on plain paper to confirm that they'd go together right. When I was convinced everything was fine, I printed a master copy on plain white paper.
Using this master copy, we photocopied the image onto the cardstock that would be used for the programs. Then we trimmed all the pages to the right size. I stronly suggest letting a copy shop do this for you, because it was boring, painstaking work. You can only cut a few sheets of cardstock at a time on a papercutter, and there's lots of cutting to do!
For the vellum overlay, we used artist's tracing paper. It was a lot less expensive (and much easier to cut), but it had a tendency to curl if it was upside down.
Once all the pages were finally ready, we formed an assembly line to put them together. One person made stacks of all the pages in order, another punched holes in the top for the ribbon, a third thread the ribbon through the holes, and the last tied the bows.
To make the holes for the ribbon, we used a rectangle-shaped hole puncher. You can find them with the scrapbook supplies at craft stores, but I imagine a regular round hole punch would work, too.
I used wired ribbon for the bows, because I like the way it holds its shape once you fluff up the bows. However, it's a little hard to thread through the holes (that's why we needed an extra person for that job), and we had to be careful not to smash the bows when we packed up the programs.
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Polaroid Guestbook:
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The Polaroid guestbook was the single part of our wedding that we got the most compliments on. The guests all loved it, and I love looking back through it! It's so much more interesting than a list of signatures!
For the book itself we used a regular 5x7" scrapbook with extra pages added. We used the page covers that are closed at the bottom, so that if any of the photos came loose, they wouldn't get lost.
For the pages, we cut pieces of ivory cardstock to the right size and kept them out for people to sign.
We took the photos as the guests arrived at the ceremony. There's a large foyer outside the sanctuary, where we set up the guestbook table and our three guestbook attendants (my aunt, uncle, and cousin).
The photos were taken with a Polaroid JoyCam, which is a less expensive Polaroid camera that takes slightly smaller photos. A JoyCam only costs around $18 new. I bought a used one on EBay for a little less than that, and my cousin brought hers.
Two attendants took photos, which helped keep things moving. With two photographers, no one had to wait for very long.
The third attendant was responsible for attaching the photos to the pages with double-sided tape and making sure that people signed them. He collected them as people entered the sanctuary and slipped them directly into the page covers in the scrapbook.
So, by the time the ceremony started, the guestbook was already finished!
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