Our venue does not provide tableware. At a certain point of paying .69 per fork and spoon, you might want to bang your head off the table instead. Is it really worth it? I mean, I love you, mom (thanks for reading!), but I’ve set the table at family dinner for years and we get by just fine with our knife, fork, and spoon. We even reuse our forks for dessert sometimes—we’re heathens!
When we met with our caterer in October, she gave us some ideas on things we could cut. I’ll share more ideas in a future post, but one idea she suggested was to do something fun for the dessert course plate and fork and not rent those pieces. I loved the idea and immediately searched the far corners of Pinterest for cheaper alternatives. We decided to purchase plastic plates, but the forks came down to two options: dipped handles on metal forks or stamped polka dot handles on wooden forks. And as my family advised, there’s no way I wanted to watch 140 painted forks drip dry.
In total, the project cost us just under $15 for 200 forks and took about an hour with soon-to-be-newlyweds teamwork. That’s a $74 savings for our wedding budget and $35 cheaper than anywhere online. Cha-ching, saving!
Your Shopping List:
The In-depth How To:
- Set up a comfy area to sit and stamp. Drink your libation. This is going be one of the easiest crafts to save some money.
- Ah, step 2, yes, this is where you get ready to actually start the stamping. Lay out your forks in sets of 3 or 4. Watch out for broken pieces—there will be a few, discard those. You should probably take a sip because this craft is so stressful!
- Start with lighter color dots and move to darker colors using the eraser end of the pencil as a stamper.
- Periodically sip your libation. Do not accidentally put your pencil eraser in the wrong ink colors and not on the handles—this will happen the more you drink. Not that I’m saying that from experience or anything.
- If you’re making a confetti dot pattern, use overlapping dots as well as dots off the sides of the handle to add a nice visual effect. There are many stamps you can purchase to do stripes/chevron/swirls/words/perfect polka dot patterns. They cost more money.
- Let forks dry while you repeat steps 2-5 as necessary. Forks are generally dry to touch within 20 seconds.
- Impress your guests with your crafty skills!
Do people actually eat using wooden forks? I’ve never heard of that. Granted, I’ve never heard of a LOT of things, but, wow …
They sure are pretty and that’s a nice chunk of change savings! 🙂
Haha, thank you! I can definitely say that I wasn’t the first person to think of it! There’s a ton of cute options out there for the non-DIY folk and they’re great for picnics/rustic styled weddings, but they’re not for every wedding.
Those forks are super cute!
If someone told me it’d be $0.69 per fork and spoon I think I might just ask everyone to bring their own, LOL! (my mom actually bought a big bag of silverware from a church sale once so I think it’d actually just use this, but still, $0.69!!)
Thanks! We considered the buying everything ourselves route and donating afterwards, but we were able to work with our caterer to get ours needs down to two forks, a knife, a salad plate, dinner plate, and water glass. Still insane, but we have a bit less than the full spread!
Those are adorable. We had a spring picnic theme for our wedding which allowed us to get creative on some of the options & save some coin. I think your forks are way cooler than what we went with, for what it’s worth. 🙂
I tried really really hard to convince my fiance for a nice morning wedding because you can really go crazy with fun options there, but he wants to shake his booty in the cover of darkness. We’re debating getting fiber paper plates and stamping them now that we know it was so easy!
Pingback: Cut the Wedding Catering Crap - Femme Frugality