Whimsical Wedding Centerpieces: Part 1

Hello there crafty friends! I hope your 2020 has been treating you well so far. Today’s blog will be the first part of a multiple part blog series devoted to working on my wedding table centerpieces. As I mentioned in my last blog post, this year will be heavy on wedding crafts!

We had a very warm day here in NH about a week ago so I took the opportunity to do some spray painting and got started on my table numbers. For a while now, I have had an idea in my head of what I have wanted the table numbers to look like and now am finally getting started on them! As some of you may know, I am a huge Harry Potter nerd and have converted my fiancé into a pretty large fan as well. We want to have a few little Harry Potter touches throughout the wedding without it being an aggressively themed wedding. I also want to preface this blog post by saying that all of the ideas for wedding crafts are supported by my fiance as well! I am not just going rogue without input from him as well!

So for the table numbers, each table will have a frame with a title page from the first Harry Potter novel inside of it. Table 1 will have the book page of chapter 1 in it and so on; there will also be a larger decorative number on each frame to make it clear from farther away which table is which. The first big step with this process was to purchase everything needed! I got spray paint, acrylic craft paint and gold shimmer paint at Michaels, as well as 12 mismatched 4 by 6 frames at both the Dollar Tree and at Goodwill. I already had some chipboard numbers and decorations so did not need to buy anything else there.

Our wedding colors are navy blue and burgundy so I decided that I would spray paint 6 of the frames navy blue and the other 6 burgundy, with the chipboard numbers on each frame being painted in the alternating color. That sentence may not make sense yet, but it will later on! I gave all of the frames about 2 coats of spray paint. I will need to go back and give the frames another 1-2 coats of spray paint, but will need to wait for some warmer weather because I will not be going outside to spray paint when it is 20 degrees outside.

As I mentioned above, I also painted 6 numbers burgundy and 6 navy blue to put on the frame of the alternating color. We will have small gold accents throughout our wedding decorations as well, so I used the gold paint to add a bit of gold shimmer to the numbers. I also painted some little chipboard decorations completely gold to add to the frames in addition to the numbers.

I have an extra copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (because I'm crazy) so I cut out the title pages from that book to use in the frames. ​My creative consultant, also know as my mother, and I thought that the pages needed to be antiqued up a bit so I used some watered down brown acrylic paint to age the pages slighty. 

Putting watery paint on the pages made them crumple up slightly as they dried, so I took out the iron and ironed each book page under a piece of parchment paper. This flattened out the pages, but ensured that the iron did not burn the paper.

And that is what I have right now! We have frames that need another coat of paint, numbers fully painted and book pages ready to be put inside the frames. I feel like this blog seemed a little scatterbrained, but everything will make sense once we get to the finished centerpiece. I swear. Bear with me. 

What crafts are you all working on in the new year?

​ - Rebecca