Eat, Drink, Marry: Inquiring Mind: Nicole

Nicole has fabric on the brain - she wanted more runner and tablecloth details. First up:

Your runner - How did you make it? Did you have anything between the fabric? What did you use as a backing?

My mom's friend Sandy made the runner for us. It was 4.5 feet wide and 40 feet long. The runner was simply cut to size, folded, and ironed. There was no backing underneath the fabric on top of the wooden deck - it was used as is. The afternoon of the wedding, it was simply stapled into place on the aisle along the edges.

By the way, If you'd like to purchase the runner, let me know - Melissa decided to go in a different direction, so we still have the runner, rolled up and ready to go, in pristine condition!

Next, Nicole asks:

Fabric in general: Where did you locate it? Did you end up making your own tablecloths? If so, were they round? And, if they were round, how did you do it?

Finding our wedding fabric was a long and fairly tedious process. My mom and I were regularly hitting fabric stores in NC and TX for months. (A taste of the search process can be found here, looking at my posts tagged "fabric.") For a while there, I had fabric samples in every bag I own, in piles around my apartment, and stacked in the closets. Eventually, I found our fabrics online, which I describe in some of the tagged posts. The online options were more reasonably priced than what we found in stores, and being able to search by yard cost prevented me from falling in love with really expensive fabric, which happened all the time in person. Premier Prints is a great company, by the way, I highly recommend them.

The runner was made from Premier Prints Amsterdam in Snorkel, which was originally purchased as a tablecloth fabric and ended up not being white enough - but was perfect as the runner.

We settled on two tablecloth fabrics: Premier Prints Amsterdam in Lipstick (which unlike the snorkel version, had a bright white background) and Premier Prints Kimono in Snorkel.

I loved the way the fabrics complemented each other without being too matchy-matchy. The punches of color were great fun at the reception and worked really well alongside all the other patterns we had going on in the decor - the DIY'd flower containers on each table, the votive holders, the table signs, and the escort cards.

So how were they made? Not by us! My mom hired one of her coworkers to make them. We knew that the tables were 60-inch rounds, so decided to make the tablecloths 84-inch squares to provide a 12-inch drop all the way around (and as you infer, Nicole, making round tablecloths is quite a bit more complicated than making squares). Each tablecloth was stitched in three pieces, with the pattern lined up precisely. The center piece was the entire width of the fabric, with two smaller strips on each side, which avoided a center seam that would've been noticeable. Our seamstress did a fantastic job - the pattern matched so precisely on each side that the seams were nearly invisible. The tablecloths went over the venue's standard white underlays, which was a way to cut down on costs, since they were free. Here are a few table photos - more and better photos getting here soon, I promise - I believe they are finally in the mail.