Ben and I love travel and from the start of our wedding planning progress, we wanted to incorporate this as part of the theme for the day with vintage suitcases and naming our tables after places we've visited together. I'd love to share some DIY ideas of how we made our table names and plan. 

We bought a few old atlases from an antique shop in Berkhamsted, a market town near us, and chose 8 of our favourite destinations, one for each table including the top table. You could also look at car boot sales or charity shops too. We looked up each place in each atlas, some destinations were over the middle of a page so we found the best image of each place and scanned the maps in to a computer.

After scanning the pages in, we used good old Microsoft Paint to cut out a heart shape around the map, being careful to use the same size and shape of heart each time by copying and pasting it each time. I then created a new A5 document on Microsoft Word for each table name and pasted the map heart in. For the name, I downloaded a vintage typewriter font from dafont.com called Travelling Typewriter. 

I got through a lot of packs of recycled, brown kraft paper for our wedding crafts. The cheapest place I found it online was from eBay, link here. For the table names I used a5 paper and printed using my home printer although if you had a lot to do you could find a local printing firm. 

I struggled, at first, to find a good way of displaying the map hearts on the tables, most real weddings in magazines or on blogs or even Pinterest seemed to use either metal stands which were working out stupidly expensive and made the displays too tall or the cheap Ikea plastic stands which I didn't like the look of. I wanted people to be able to find their table and appreciate the map hearts without standing out too much. Photo frames in the end turned out to be the best option for our wedding and I bought a variety of cheap frames {7x5 inches in size} from Wilkinson's for about £1 each that were originally gold, but painted them cream with Annie Sloan chalk paint we had from previous interior projects.

I framed the map hearts and a couple of quotes to display at the wedding. Then packed them away until the day, it's one of those jobs that if you know roughly how many tables you have, you might as well do ahead of time to get organised.

The frames sat on each table, we had St Ives at our top table as the place where we got engaged amongst flowers in jam jars. 

Once we had the table names made, we started on the table plan framing a vintage world map, which was a piece of wrapping paper costing just £2.99 from a card shop in Marlow. It's a Stamford's 'Mercator's' map if you're looking for one. {We've also got one framed in our downstairs toilet}. It's a standard size for the large poster style Ikea frames in various colours. We couldn't finish the project though until about a week before the wedding day, wanting to double check all our guests were coming before we printed out the plan. Arranging where to sit our guests took a little bit of time, trying to seat people together who would get on well but equally try and keep the table sizes similar. Ben helped me make the luggage tags, we typed names into boxes on word using the typewriter font with a small red heart at the bottom to tie in with other stationery used and printed them out, using a luggage tag label as a template to cut around for the shape. We ordered brown hole reinforcers to make the brown templates look like proper luggage tags and punched a hole and stuck the reinforcers each side. We then tied string around the frame pulling it tight and threaded the luggage tags through. 

We screwed the frame onto an old wooden step ladder decorated with flowers from our florist in jam jars and put it at the entrance of the barn where we ate so it was visible to people coming in. 

Photos taken by Binky Nixon Photographer, our wedding photographer.

R <3 xx