(Wedding) Party in the USA

Sometimes it feels almost impossible to make your wedding stand out from the pack.  Magazines, websites, books, and blogs offer a lot of the same ideas over and over again, making the weddings look almost cookie-cutter.  With thousands of brides looking at the same sources for inspiration, it's inevitable that some new idea will become common practice in no time.  This clone-like aspect of weddings, combined with my relative lack of creativity and crafting skills, kind of sends shivers down my spine when I let my mind wander in an attempt to come up with a flair of personality and individuality for our upcoming wedding festivities.  With that being said, just try to imagine the sheer ecstasy I experienced when I finally conjured up an idea that I didn't beg, borrow, or steal from anyone or anywhere else.  It's allllll mine!

 

Image via I Can Has Cheezburger?

(OK, realistically, I'm sure I'm not the first bride to do this project.  However, I've not seen it in any of my wedding materials, so I'm going to keep up my delusion that I actually am the first person to experience such a stroke of genius to result in this creation.  Humor me, mmk?)

A little bit of backstory. Mr. Snow Cone and I are having a relatively large bridal party, with 7 attendants on each side.  Additionally, we each have very large extended families.  The rehearsal and rehearsal dinner is likely to be the first occasion for so many of our beloved friends and families to finally cross paths.  In order to spark conversation and prove that this gargantuan group of people has a great deal in common, I've set out to create a wedding map.

My plan?  I bought a cheap wall map of the United States to display at the rehearsal dinner.  I accrued a list of important cities from each of our wedding party/family VIPs.  These lists include information such as a person's:

• hometown
• college location
• honeymoon location
• wedding location
• current location

The list amounted to almost 80 cities, and that's with a substantial amount of overlap among our people!  As a result, there were just too many cities to display the city AND its significance(s), so I opted to number them and provide a key to let people know the importance of each city to our wedding crowd.  Here's the map:

And here's a closer view of the basic numbering system I used:

For the key, I'm using a simple format to let people know the basic information.  It'll look something like this:

20.  Charleston, SC

Honeymoon: Mr. & Mrs. Snow Cone

I'm planning to display it in a communal area during our rehearsal dinner so that our guests will wander by the map and utter something to the effect of "I had no idea Person X went to college in any town, USA!  That's where I grew up!" and so on.  We have so many people traveling from so far away for such a short stay, I'm hoping this little project will help people to really click with each other and encourage some serious mixing and mingling.

What wedding projects are you especially proud of?

(all photos personal unless otherwise noted.)