Hi there!
I hope you all are having a great week so far! My week seems to be going SO slow; Justin and I leave on Friday after work for a vacation and I am so excited! I have to keep distracting myself so that I don’t focus on time or otherwise this week will seem never-ending. Come on Friday!!
Wedding Wednesday: “Welcome Table” decorations
For today’s Wedding Wednesday post I thought I’d start re-capping some of the decorations we had around our wedding. I should preface this by saying Pinterest became my BFF during the wedding planning and it was definitely reflected in the decorations. Wish I could take all these ideas as mine alone but I took lots of inspiration from others. I still tried to put my own spin on things so that counts for originality points, right? All photographs below are copyright Rothwell Photography.
For today, I’m gonna focus on the things on the tables at what I call the “welcome table.” This was the first thing guests saw: where they were dropped off gifts, signed the guestbook, and got programs! I wanted it to be functional, interesting, and helpful to our guests.
I incorporated chalkboards in a couple different ways. I bought mini chalkboards from a local store and used them as signs to give info to guests.
I used one small one in front of a wooden box to tell guests where to leave their cards. (Props to my wedding coordinator for thinking to use extra painted bottles and flowers to spruce up the area. More on the painted bottles in another post!)
I didn’t ask anyone to hand out programs so I used one chalkboard to instruct guests on what they needed to do. I had a basket with song sheets, another wooden box with programs, and a huge tub with bottled waters for guests to grab before they went on to the ceremony.
Speaking of programs . . .
My amazing sister helped me put together these cute fan programs in the days before the wedding. I used navy and green font and the same tree drawing (which my other amazing sister drew herself!!) that was used on our invitations. Making the fans was super simple! I printed out the programs on cardstock, folded them in half, used spray glue (found here) to attach popsicle sticks to the back of the cardstock, and sealed the fold together. Once the glue had dried, I used a scrapbook corner cutter to round the edges so they looked more polished. Easy! And it was very appreciated by my guests since it was a hot day!
Now on to a few more things!
Also on the welcome table was the guest book. For this, I found a giant letter “W” (for our last name) at Hobby Lobby and I had a friend paint and distress it using green paint. (Not only was green a wedding color but it’s also a color I use in almost every room of our house so I knew I could use the letter to decorate later!)
I absolutely loved that we did this! The letter is now hanging up in our living room — the perfect reminder of our special day and all the loved ones who shared it with us!
And speaking of loved ones who shared it with us, there were a lot of loved ones who couldn’t make it to the wedding. Specifically, Justin’s grandparents were both in poor health and lived four hours from our wedding site so they were unable to attend. We wanted to pay respects to them so we put their pictures on a table near the guestbook with a little sign that said “Loved ones celebrating from afar” because we knew they were celebrating in spirit!
We also included a picture of Justin’s grandpa, my grandpa, and one of my childhood best friends, all of whom unfortunately passed away long before Justin and I knew one another. We wanted to remember them too so we included a sign that read “loved ones celebrating from above” — it was hard to not have them with us at our wedding but I love knowing they were still watching over us!
And continuing the picture theme, on the other side of the table, we had a grouping of pictures from our ancestor’s weddings. We were lucky enough to find pictures of all of our grandparents at their weddings in addition to our parents. For fun, we also threw in baby photos of the two of us. 🙂
I’m glad we had all the photos out because it gave our guests something to look at while waiting in line for the guest book and programs. And it was a great way to pay to tribute to all the marriages that we respect and admire!
And that’s all for now! All of the decorations were super simple and easy — just the way I like it! And none of them took very long to put together except for the fans which did take over an hour to complete.
More decorations to come in the next Wedding Wednesday! Which will not be next week because I’ll be on VACATION!! Whoop whoop!!
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Today’s outfit was warm weather wishful thinking. Can’t wait to not have to wear cardigans and tights with everything!
Dress: Maurices (exact unavailable) ~ Cardigan: Maurices (exact here) ~ Tights: Express (exact here; similar here) ~ Black suede pumps: Target (exact old, similar here and here) ~ Belt: Maurices (exact here) ~ Earrings: Gift from a friend
simplify the chaos 