3. Put together your own table decorations.
Why? Like I mentioned earlier, my husband and I are both English majors. We wanted to have vases of flowers on top of books for decorations, and it's pretty difficult to rent book-themed centerpieces from party rental stores. This DIY project most definitely did not help save us money, but we were able to create awesome table decorations that fit our tastes/the feel of the wedding.
How do you DIY? First you need to decide what kind of books you are looking for: vintage, poetry, specific authors, etc... Early on we decided each table would be assigned a famous author (instead of table numbers). We compiled a list of all the authors we wanted, then did some math to figure out how many tables we were going to need. From there we were able to trim the initial list down to 20 or so authors. (I can't remember exactly how many tables we had...oops!)
We knew we needed at least 5 books on each table in order to achieve the look we wanted (4 seemed too few to have a full (and put-together) look). Thus began to search for 100 books! (5 from each author). Luckily, we are both English majors, so we had a handful of books in our own personal libraries. Even more luckily, I have a cousin who works at a Half Price Books and she was able to keep an eye out for cool copies of the books we were so desperately in need of.
Books are beautiful lined up side-by-side on a shelf, but having a stack of 5 books centered on a white table cloth wasn't enough to satisfy this bride. We decided to use burlap squares to center the books on the tables. (Tip: Never rent burlap, it's outrageously overpriced. You can buy packs of burlap bags at Fleet Farm or other gardening centers for dirt cheap. Plus, you get to cut them to the size/shape you want!) The burlap alone still left the centerpieces feeling "flat," and at that point we decided to use doilies to spruce things up.
We collected the vases (all shapes and sizes, the more variety the better) from thrift stores and garage sales. We even used some mason jars as vases (we collected them to use for the drinking glasses and had quite a few extra).
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The last step to completing our centerpieces was to search the internet to find and print portraits of each author (some photographs, some paintings), and purchase small frames to nestle each author between the books and the flower vases on each table.
Because the head table was a different shape we didn't have room for all the books. Instead of using square burlap cloths we used a long burlap runner across the entire length of the table (running all the way to the ground on both ends). To conserve on doilies, we put them under every other flower vase on the head table. (P.S. my talented mother-in-law crocheted two of the doilies for the head table, one of them is in the picture below.)
During the ceremony my husband read an excerpt from Song of the Open Road by Walt Whitman and I read an excerpt from Walden by Henry David Thoreau. We didn't have books on the head table, but we did have these author's photographs in front of our table settings.
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