Hi everyone! I'm Jen with the haystack needle. I'm so happy to be guest blogging this week here on Oh So Beautiful Paper while Nole moves into her new apartment!  I'm a huge fan of OSBP, and there are few things (besides homemade gelato) that I love more than stationery and pretty paper goodness.  To kick off the week, I thought I'd share some details from my wedding. 

I had so much fun planning and crafting the elements of our wedding — for seven months I was stamping, snipping, and sewing on our living room floor.  Dan and I got married on a farm in Maine (his home state), so I let the natural setting inspire all the details.

I've always loved skeleton keys, and I liked the idea of having guests pick up a key to find their seat. I organized our 60 guests into seating groups by animals (and the butterfly, my favorite).  These key tags also served as an alternative guestbook.  I made a sign telling everyone to sign the back of their tag, and then my friend Sue-Anne picked them all up.  I have a vintage blue mason jar filled with the key tags now on our dresser.  It's fun to read the messages every once in a while.  By the way, the keys I used were actually wooden skeleton keys I found on Etsy.  I couldn't find a lot of skeleton keys for a good price on eBay, and I liked the idea of wooden keys.

The table cards were everyday letterpress cards by Pancake & Franks (who also designed our custom wedding invitations, which I'm sharing tomorrow!).  I brought the cards to a local rubber stamp maker who created custom stamps from the images of the cow, horse, pig, bird, butterfly, and rooster on the cards.  Then I stamped river rocks at each place setting to make the seat groupings
clear, since we were using long communal tables rather than separate
round tables.  I loved Stacy Pancake's horseshoe card, so Dan and I used the good luck horseshoe to mark our seats.

The photo above is of our handmade ceremony programs.  Here's what I used: bakers twine, rubber stamps, faux bois paper, Japanese screw punch, and I printed out the program text on kraft brown paper.

I like to use my ever-growing collection of rubber stamps whenever possible.  So the stamping didn't stop with the paper.  I bought floursack towels from Kmart and dressed them up with a little pattern using stamps and fabric paint, and we used the printed tea towels at each place setting. (Do not try this with a large wedding!)  In hindsight, I should have figured out how to silkscreen the pattern, which would have saved a ton of time.  After the wedding, the tea towels were a sweet way to say thanks to my friends who were a tremendous help pulling everything together with me.  We went with biodegradable bamboo forks, knives, spoons, and plates — I saved a ton of money on rentals and didn't need to hire a dishwasher. 

It was blueberry season in Maine in September when we got married.  Early on, we decided our favor should be a food treat and we fell in love with the idea of blueberry jam.  I sampled a bunch of Maine blueberry jams and found them to be too sweet, too jiggly, too pasty, or just not quite right.  Spoon had just debuted their collection of homemade jams, and after sampling their blueberry jam, I knew it was the one.  And it was sweet that Spoon packages their jams in pretty jars  — even the turquoise blue label coincidentally fit in my wedding color palette.  I made paper butterfly tags to dress up the jars.  I love how the butterflies look like they're about to take flight. 

More details on our wedding tomorrow — including our invitations!  See you soon.  

All photographs by our wedding photographer, Charlotte Jenks Lewis.  She's amazing!