Where is time going??? Today’s adventure actually happened almost a week ago, last Friday to be exact. And although I meant to write about it immediately, here we are, a week later. Whoops.
As the today’s title might suggest, today we’re talking about dishes. Wedding dishes, to be precise.
In case you haven’t read here, here, or here, our wedding is anything but traditional. We’ve made it our mission to make sure that every detail completely represents who we are and what we like. So it was a bit disappointing to see how impersonal (and frankly a bit boring) wedding china can be. We had initially planned on renting all of our plates, glasses, etc.- mainly to save us from spending the final hours of our wedding night doing dishes. But after looking around at company after company and seeing nothing outside of white china with gold and silver banding, we knew we would have to do our own dishes, our own way. Which meant a trip to Goodwill.
When I was a kid, my mom used to take us to Goodwill to pick up vintage plates which she then used to border her many gardens. I remember going to Goodwill with my older sister at one of her houses to collect plates for her kitchen. I guess you can say it is a bit of a quirky family tradition. Thankfully Brian loved the idea of using vintage plates for our wedding day as much as I did, so off to Goodwill we went. And here is the result:
This is only about half of what we’ll need! We were able to find 72 funky plates on our first trip to Goodwill, and we’ll definitely be searching for more in the coming weeks. Most of the plates are different, but a few were bundled as packs of three or four. Even so, the effect should be about the same. How many weddings have you been to where this was your plate?
And we’ve even found a way to avoid washing all of those dishes at the end of night- by giving them away! Since we’re sure to have leftovers, we plan on putting a note on each table letting guests know they are more than welcome to pile their plate with leftovers to take home.
Hopefully people will like their plates enough to take us up on it, since this plan does have a bit of a chance of backfiring. But oh well, it’s just one more step towards a completely “us” wedding that we had to take!
After we checked out at Goodwill (with many stares and comments), we headed over to Meijer to fulfill another dishy need: glassware. Again, we had considered simply renting glassware, but continuing our mason jar theme just seemed way to perfect to pass up. But since we didn’t want our guests drinking out of vintage jars (we washed all of the jars from our antique store score, but still) we headed to the aisle where I had seen loads of brand-spanking-new canning jars a few days before. And we brought home 14 cases!
Each case has 12 pint sized jars, which leaves us with 168 jars. Plus, the jars will double as place card holders for the cute cards I nabbed for a steal and showed you
here. We plan on tying the cards to each jar, with the guest’s name on one side and their table number on the other. That way, the place card doubles as an ID tag if someone sets their glass down and isn’t sure if they’ve picked the right one back up. And we’ll have a cute sign on the table that let’s them know to hold on to their glass and keep it plenty full all night long!
So, that’s an update on what we’ve been dishing up lately. We’re still working on silverware, but we’ll likely grab a bunch at Costco and donate it after the wedding. I’ll keep you updated, of course.
And stay tuned for tomorrow- I’m spilling all of the deets on our unruly wedding pile that’s peeking out in the top photo above!
Cool! I like this idea and again, never would have thought of it.
Unrelated to weddings, but related to dishes, I am planning on eventually doing a post about all of the dishes I own. I have three full sets, one from when we got married, and two from my grandmother. I knew having three sets was a bit much, but I didn't realize HOW many pieces of each set we had until we had to unload them from the cabinet when we had out dishwasher put in (they needed to access the cabinet to run the water line). Crazy!
Oh man, that is pretty awesome! I can't wait to read it!