DIY Wedding

Escort Card DIY For Our Destination Wedding in France

With the stay at home orders in place for COVID-19, I’ve finally had the time to clean and organize our home. We moved in over a year ago and because I was pregnant at the time, we packed and unpacked fairly quickly and once Bébé was here, organizing the home went out the door.

In my closet organization efforts, I found our escort card display that we used for our destination wedding in France and I always wanted to share the DIY I did for it.

escort card display at our French destination wedding

Photo by Alexis Courraud Photographe

Having a destination wedding requires you to be conscientious about what you’re packing – I had to consider each item and whether it was worth taking up space and weight in our luggage. I actually enjoyed this challenge because it really made us limit the items we brought to the wedding and to focus on the basics.

The Escort Cards

Since we were having assigned table seating, we needed escort cards to direct guests to their table. Rather than going with the typical escort cards, I wanted to provide something more personalized. Originally I had considered a large display with all our guests’ names written on it, but quickly nixed this idea due to size and knowing that there could be last minute changes.

On my Pinterest searches, I came across ideas of using pictures of your guests as their escort cards and loved this idea so that it could be something our guests could keep and not necessarily throw out like any other escort card. We decided to collect photos of our guests via their social media outlets or photos we had of them. I found a company that printed out photos in the retro polaroid style – Super Snaps. We were also able to print text at the bottom of each print, which we used to include our guest names.

For those few guests of whom we could not find or get a photo, I used images of Fontevraud Abbey, our wedding location. I also had a few extras printed out with no text in case we had some last minute RSVPs or changes. On the back of each polaroid escort card, I wrote out the table names.

Escort Card Display

For the actual escort card display, I wanted something to hold the polaroid prints rather than placing them out on a table, especially since I wasn’t sure if we would have wind or rain to consider. I liked the idea of a wooden board, but this would be too heavy to bring with us and I didn’t want to go through the trouble of trying to find a place to rent or purchase it in France. I looked into framed corkboards which I could ‘reupholster’ with fabric, but again these were too large to bring in our suitcase. That’s when I found these 16″ x 20″ cork foamboards – they were small enough to fit into our suitcase and extremely light.

I decided to cover the cork foamboards in a gray linen fabric to match with our wedding colors. Since I wasn’t sure yet where the escort card display would go, I had to make sure the front and the back of the board was presentable, so rather than stapling the fabric to the board which would have been the easy route, I sewed a ‘pillowcase’ for each of the boards.

Based on the size of the polaroid prints, I determined I would need three foamcore boards, but they came in a set of four so I made a pillowcase for all four of the boards in case we needed a backup.

DIY Linen Corkboard Cover

Materials:

cork foam board
fabric – I went to Joanns to look for grey linen fabric (similar here)
sewing machine + thread (if you don’t have a sewing machine, I’m sure you can do this with iron-on hem adhesive or no sew fabric glue)
mini polaroid prints
gold thumbtacks

Instructions:

Measure your foam corkboard and cut out your fabric adding a 1″ on the width. Since I was making a pillowcase, we’ll only need to sew on the long sides and finish off the bottom edge.
If your fabric has a right side, fold the fabric lengthwise to have the right sides facing each other.
On the short ends, fold 1/2″ hem on each end (iron if needed), pin, and sew. This will give you the finished opening (bottom) of the fabric cover.
Pin along each of the long edges and sew 1/2″
Turn the cover inside out so that the “right” sides are showing and iron if needed to flatten the seams.
Voila! An easy cover (aka pillowcase) for your corkboard.