Make all the things

25 feet of wrinkly cotton duck, waiiting to be ironed

In keeping with our rustic location and rustic styling (and our low budget and our disdain for the standard wedding trappings), most everything for the wedding is being made by Chris and I.  As the date looms nears, we’re really ramping up our crafting.

First of all, having your reception in a park means you’re seating everyone at picnic tables.  Picnic tables tend to be dirty and splinter-y, so we’re putting table cloths over them, and we’re also making table runners.  Originally, we had planned on using muslin for the table cloths, but Theaterworks (where Chris works) very kindly gave us about 250 yards of cotton duck (a thin canvas) for free!  You can’t beat free.

The tablecloth making process involves cutting it down into 6 foot by 25 foot chunks, so that I can get it into the washing machine, then washing and drying it because it hung as a wall in a warehouse for like 10 years.  Then, once it’s clean I stretch it out on our living room floor and iron it – all 6 feet by 25 feet of it.  That takes an hour, by the way.  Once it’s ironed, we put our template on top of it, cut the final size and shape for the tablecloth (20 feet by 4 feet) and then I go serge it.

Favor bags – the emerald green side.

Of course, I completely burned out one serger and am struggling to get another to work right.  You know, because nothing can ever be THAT simple.

We’ve got all the rough cuts done and about half of them are washed and cut down to tablecloth size.  Well be using the remnants from all this fabric for pennants and other things – nothing goes to waste in our household!

While I was ironing tablecloths ad nauseum, Chris also took every single one of the favor bags we bought and stamped green celtic knot hearts on one side, and blue celtic knot hearts on the other side.  They turned out so pretty!  He did the whole task, while also stopping to help me lay out the templates and cut the final tablecloths.  He’s such a pro.  😀

So far this has been both our biggest art project ever, and the longest.  We are learning that we work really well together – even when we’re both feeling overwhelmed and tired and wanting to give up.  I’m really lucky to have a partner who has so many skills and is so willing to have fun producing with me.  😀

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