Coming Up Daisies: Escort Cards

Way, way back in the dark ages...you know, in March of 2008 when I furiously started planning this wedding, I fell in love with escort cards tucked neatly in beds of wheatgrass. And really, what's not to love? It's bold, vibrant, matches our color scheme...and if we get really ambitious we can make healthy smoothies with it the next day!

I didn't, however, want to use the standard folded escort cards. I wanted paper flowers.

Source: Brooklyn Bride

For the past year (yes, year!) I have searched high and low for the perfect way to fulfill my vision. I've always loved origami, so I tried any and every folded flower I could find instructions for (beyond the basic lily...far too easy, and I wanted to show off some mad origami skillz). But every option I found either wouldn't have set well in the wheatgrass, would be difficult to attach a leaf to, or just simply involved far too many steps for me to make 60+ flowers.

Another roadblock with orgami was the paper. Most of the prints I found just didn't fit in with our color scheme, and I didn't want to use a non-origami paper as origami paper is really the most convenient to fold with and it's already in perfect squares.

I finally gave up the origami dream and trolled the Internet searching for a better solution. I came across a papercrafting blog called Scrappy Habits that has a great tutorial for incredibly cute paper flowers.

Source: Scrappy Habits

I immediately bought the supplies I needed from JoAnn Fabric - black and white cardstock, teeny green brads and a 2-inch scalloped circle cutter. I decided to use black cardstock as the base for all of the flowers, and then for the top piece, half are plain white cardstock and half are cut from pages from a book of love poems by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. I like how the poems look as flowers, and that if guests look closely they'll find snippets of loving words.


It only took me about an hour to use the handy little scallop cutter to punch all of these out. Then, another evening Mr. S helped me cut, fold the petals and put them together with the green brads. But...of course we don't know seating assignments yet! The greatest part of this project is that we could pre-make all of the flowers that we need, and then when we have the seating assignments, make the leaves with the guests' names and attach them.


For the leaves, I created a teardrop leaf shape in Microsoft Publisher. To ease the process, I just outlined them with a green dot pattern, so I can just cut around the pattern and not have it look too sloppy (I hope!). On each one I'll print the names and seating assignments in a very light grey and then trace over them with a felt tip pen, like I did here. I used a typewriter font to match the font we're using on our invitations and in other places (sorry for the blurry picture, this is what happens when Mr. S is off shooting weddings...I'm left to my own devices with the camera!).


Our box full of flowers is complete and just waiting for leaves! I'm so glad to have knocked out this project so early in the game, and I'm excited to see all of these blooms scattered across the trays of wheatgrass.

I'll leave you with a snippet from the Pablo Neruda poem "Not Only the Fire":

Ah my life,
it is not only the fire that burns between us
but all of life,
the simple story,
the simple love
of a woman and a man
like everyone.
Did you do anything special with your escort cards?