How to do a wedding table plan

Argh… the dreaded table plan. This comes in two stages: arrang­ing all your guests, and then mak­ing a pretty table plan design.

Arrang­ing wed­ding guests’ seating

The top table at your wed­ding, if you’re going with tra­di­tional eti­quette, goes like this:

But I’m not one for fol­low­ing tra­di­tional eti­quette. Have a friendly top table if you’d rather — I’ve blogged wed­dings where guests were in three rooms and the bride and groom hopped rooms, it’s also com­mon to hop tables within the same room: any­thing goes! Then think about who you want to have on the clos­est tables to the top one.

Also think about any guests who don’t get along: divorced cou­ples are the most obvi­ous who need care­ful planning!

Don’t write guests’ names on lit­tle scraps of paper and exper­i­ment with dif­fer­ent lay­outs on your din­ing table. One sneeze and you’ve lost the lot! Either use online table plan­ning tool TopTablePlanner.com or or find some­thing sticky: a cork board you can pin each guest name into would work fine, or post-it notes if you can get the diddy lit­tle ones (and when it’s din­ner time, you can pick the whole thing up and use your table again!)

 

How to make your wed­ding table plan

1. Small pieces of card are tricky to print on. So print your guests’ names on A4 sheets — per­haps two tables per page — and cut them out.

2. To cut your tables so they’re all the same size and shape, cut a rec­tan­gle / cir­cle from trac­ing paper or bak­ing parch­ment. Put this over your printed tables mak­ing sure every­thing looks cen­tred, draw round it then cut out.

3. Cut slightly larger shapes from a dif­fer­ent colour card to back each of your tables. Allow about 5mm to show behind each printed table. Glue them together with spray glue — dis­play mount, or use dou­ble sided tape.

4. Posi­tion your tables roughly on the board you’re using for your plan — just to work out how they’ll look. Try and get a sym­met­ri­cal arrange­ment. Don’t glue any­thing yet.

5. Mea­sure an equal gap between each table — and use a pen­cil to mark where each table will go, exactly.

6. Glue the tables onto the mount­board with dis­play mount (or dou­ble sided tape). If you’re using dis­play mount, spray it out­side! (read the warn­ings on the can of course, but the real rea­son to spray it out­side is that it gets everywhere).

7. Arrange your embell­ish­ments — but­ter­flies, flow­ers, hearts etc. What­ever you’ve cho­sen to stick on your plan, there are two basic ways of arrang­ing things:

Scat­tered, in lit­tle groups of three around the plan — this is less for­mal and more eye-catching. Lit­tle groups of glit­tery but­ter­flies par­tic­u­larly look lovely.

After adding your main embell­ish­ments, you can play with dia­mantes. Play around with your dia­mantes first, posi­tion­ing them with­out using any glue, to see what looks best. I like to use one or two per table, or per­haps arrange them in lit­tle swirls (S-shapes) near your embellishments.

Back to the How-To Wed­ding Guide