Head(s) Over Heels: Take your seat for the show!

So I might have told you guys (or maybe not, I forget who I tell what to these days…) that instead of using numbers to mark our tables, Javier and I decided a while back to ‘name’ our tables after the plays/musicals we saw during our courtship (since that was what we loved, well love, to do together). We thought it was another fun detail we could add to the day to make it a little more special; a little more us. So instead of sitting at ‘Table 8’ our guests would sit at the ‘Design for Living’ table. Sure, it’s a little more complicated, but also more fun J

This idea started a while back, but took some thought to really flush out, starting with how to display or identify which plays were assigned what tables. Now, I’ll admit it, I’m a bit of a saver. I still have everything from the first Valentine Javs ever gave me (it was homemade) to the White House Christmas brochure I picked up on one of our first dates. Believe it or not, we still have a ticket and/or playbill from just about every show we’ve seen together. I knew these artifacts somehow held the key, but how to display them on our tables so they were easily spotted by our searching guests? Luckily, I’ve been following ~~a million~~ ~~most of~~ some industry blogs looking for good ideas to incorporate into our day. Finally, one day, I spotted a look I liked: wine bottles. We would remove the front cover of all the playbills we had saved and glue them to wine bottles to elegantly display on each table.

attempting to soak bottles (which is all
mom said she did) but man did i struggle

Luckily, Mom and Dad are regulars at a restaurant down the street in Williamsburg. Their tendency to want to watch baseball when they come in combined with mom’s special drink order (they make a ‘Barb’ martini for her every time) resulted in them getting to know most of the bartenders. While I’m sure we would have ingested the needed wine to retrieve so many bottles over the course of the year, chances are they would have be different shapes and colors. Instead, Mom asked her buddy bartenders if they might save their discarded house wine bottles for her to take away when she came in. We had 30+ bottles in no time! As if that wasn’t enough, my incredible mother painstakingly undertook the task of scraping all the labels off for me as well. (I attempted with minimal success.)

Now I had clean and clear wine bottles, a bunch of playbills and a hazy idea. Javier and I started by narrowing down our plays to just 12 (the number of tables we needed for dinner). We tried to consider the look of the playbills, significance of the play, theater, or date and our enjoyment of the show to determine what to use. We ended up with these:

The Alchemist (Felipe acted in this show!)

Avenue Q

Bill Cosby (Kennedy Center performance)

Blackbird (one of our first dates at our neighborhood theater Studio Theatre!)

Chicago

Design for Living

Jersey Boys

Les Miserables

Men Fake Foreplay

Next to Normal (inspiration for our engagement signs!)

The Sound of Music (Wolftrap live performance)

West Side Story (Javs first trip to NYC!)

Then I set to work. I started by making color copies of our saved playbills. (You can actually see our finger prints on some of them if you look closely). Then I trimmed up the copies and Mod Podged them to the wine bottles. It took a few attempts (luckily I had extra bottles and bills) to figure out the right size, but I was actually really happy with how they turned out J Super colorful and easy to see!

Since the playbills only took up 2/3 of the bottle, I started to wonder what do to with the other side. I had picked up some chalkboard paint on one of my bazillion trips to Michael’s, figuring I’d use it for some wedding project or another. I decided to tape off a rectangle and paint the other side of the bottle with chalkboard paint, just to see how it looked.

I’m a food person. (I think we’ve talked about this.) And love when I see menus displayed or available at the weddings I attend. Its fun to see the fancy description of what you’re about to eat. It always gets me pumped (not that I needed much help) for dinner. I knew I wanted our guests to know the menu for our family style dinner at our wedding too, but had been debating how to display it? A big board on an easel outside of the pavilion? Print individual menu cards for each place? Or maybe a couple per table? In the end, my wine bottles gave me the answer. I could use the chalkboard side of each bottle to write out our dinner menu to display on each table!