place cards and labels.

Having 12 children in the wedding, and 11 of them with assigned seating, I decided early on to make name tags for their chairs at the ceremony, so they know, and adults around them know, where they are to sit.

As added incentive, I stapled a dollar bill to each of the children's name tags. I talked about the dollars at the rehearsal dinner and got all the kids excited to have their dollars, IF they behave the next day. All the kids did amazing, also, our photographer knew about the dollars and reminded them when we were taking pictures.

(AnnaLisa showing off her dollar)

The adults also got name tags:I also needed to label the cupcake flavors and coffee/hot water/lemonade/fruit punch etc. I already had the stamps and the ink was left over from my napkin rolls.
I had originally bought a print-your-own invitation kit, but after Staples couldn't print on them, I didn't use them for the invitations.

The invitation cards were a good size for the place cards and other various labels.
The RSVP cards in the kit were perfect size for my cupcake flavors labels. (still looking for a better picture of the labels) They were supposed to be cut in half when used as RSVPs but i found folding them in half worked well for little tent-stands.

I also stamped the note for my signature frame, bathroom door signs, and goodie bags in the same way.

COST OF PROJECT:

• Invitation kit: Leftover, but was $3.97 on clearance at JoAnn's, envelopes were used for invitations and thank you notes.
• Stamps: already owned, but were like $5 on clearance at a local scrapbooking store
• Ink: Leftover from other project, but were $4/pad at JoAnn's and Michaels
• Dollars: $11 + $1 because my nephew Shua ripped his during the reception and I replaced it.

Cupcake Tree ~ revisited

I am so happy with my decision to do cupcakes and to display them in tiers like a traditional cake.

read about cupcake stand ideas here

I took this, a naked Cupcake Tree:

and turned it into this:
read about the flavors here

what i did was take a few rolls of solid blue wrapping paper and wrapped all the peices, attatching with tape. Assembled all the peices. (super easy to assemble, btw) then we hot glued the orange ribbon around the edge of each tier. then, using double sided tape, my bridesmaid put paper doilies all over each level. The cupcakes were organized by flavor, and on the table under the stand, i put hand stamped signs for each flavor.

The top tier was a Big Top Cupcake. I have a lovely friend Tresha, who owns a cake decorating buisness, Pink Princess Cakes who came over with some other friends, and family members to help frost all the cupcakes. That day, I was going to bake the jumbo cupcake, but it didnt turn out (looked done, but was batter still on the inside, (thats what I get for not following directions) so, being as wonderful as she is, Tresha took the pan home with her and brought it back morning of the wedding. My only instruction was that i wanted it to look like a big cupcake, and my "bride and groom" topper idea was to make cupcakes look like a bride and groom.

This is what she brought, and WE LOVED IT:

it was super yummy too! since we cut into this cake for the cake cutting ceremony, we saved the groom and bride cupcakes for our 1 year anniversary.

ETA I have since used this cupcake tree 7 MORE TIMES! read about that here

Have our cake and eat it too!

In liu of favors, which in my opinion are often a waste of money, time, energy, and resources, we are offering the option for our guests to take home the extra cupcakes in little to-go cups.

(all you need is LOVE... and cake! )

I designed 5 different lables so they wouldn't all be the same. Kinda like the hot sauce packets at Taco Bell

(have our cake.... and eat it too) (thanks for making our day sweeter)

(how SWEET it to be loved by you...) and my fave: (you take the cake! No really, take it.)

(the colors on these images arent quite right, the orange is more orange)

The cups and lids came from a local fastfood restraunt supply store Cash N Carry

I had the lables printed on sticker paper (also known as full sheet lables) at Staples. They werent going to print them for me, they said that the machine gets too hot and it can make the stickers peel and jam in the machine, but had had such a bad time with Staples, the girl took pity on me and offered to try it. between each sheet, it took a moment to get them ready for printing, so the machine had a chance to cool down. So my tip would be to either print at home, or find out ahead of time if the printing place you go to can handle sticker paper.

My wedding craft fairies cut them out using a Fiscars shape cutter and the circle template.

(photo courtesy of google images and vickie)

the price breakdown:

the cups came in a package of 50 for 5.95
the lids were 50 for 3.99

I already had some full page sticker/lable sheets. If I didnt have them, I would have printed on regular paper and used my xyron, because sticker paper is expensive, I had gotten the paper years ago from my employer for a project where I didnt end up using them, so free to me.

I was able to fit 15 lables per page and printing was only $0.49/page at Staples. I printed 5 pages, so 2.45 total.

for all they cost $12.39 for 50 cups, less than 0.25 each.

Afterthough: Since we are hosting Thanksgiving the month after the wedding, any of the cups that arent used can be repurposed for Thankgiving leftovers rather than using ziplock bags or paper plates. In fact I like that idea so much, I might pick up another package of the containers just for leftovers.