I'm sensing a theme...

While it was fairly easy to pick wedding colors - I settled on navy and fuschia after a brief flirtation with blush and gold - it was considerably harder to decide on a theme. I know you don't really need one and plenty of people have beautiful weddings completely devoid of an articulable theme, but I'm a lady who needs some direction. Otherwise, I'll just be adrift in a sea of Pinterest pins, mixing rustic favors with classically romantic escort cards and whimsical table numbers. Oh, the horror that would be!

When Bridesmaid J and I went to my first consultation with a potential florist, she asked about our colors and our theme.

 "We're going to do navy and fuschia for the colors, and the theme is... uh... is, uhhh...." Quick, lady! You can't let the florist think you don't have a theme! She's a wedding professional... don't let her think you're some sort of bridal slacker! Come up with something! "Um... gardens? Cause it's in a botanical garden?" Yes! Quick thinking, girl. Crisis averted.

"Gardens! That's a great idea," said the florist, ever gracious. She whipped out a catalog of centerpiece stands and, before I knew it, came up with some brilliant ideas for an English garden themed celebration. My panicked last minute gotta-have-a-theme theme? Not so bad after all!

Armed with a new sense of direction, I started thinking about the details. Although we're still ten months out from the wedding, I want to get a head start on some of our DIY projects so that I don't wind up spending next spring freaking out, up to my elbows in felt and glue and misery. Escort cards seemed like a good place to start. I loved the idea of paper flower escort cards - and frankly, I've been dying for an excuse to get one of those little paper flower kits from Paper Source - so I picked up the Mini Magnolia kit. I wanted to see whether assembling 180 of those suckers was going to be a fun, crafty thing to do... or a paper-based system of torture that would drive me slowly over the edge. 

Turns out it's the former... at least so far. The flowers come together pretty fast and are really, really cute! But now the problem I'm running into is how to turn these cute flowers into functioning escort cards. At first, I thought I could just print the names and table numbers on the leaves:

Nice, but not so functional. The flower petals obscure the names and the table numbers. No dice!

My second try fared a bit better, but still not really perfect:

It's a little bit easier to read the pertinent information, but the bloom really covers up a little too much. I think part of the problem could be solved by gluing down the flower a bit closer to the edge of the paper... but honestly, I feel like there must be a more attractive solution out there. Any ideas?