Monday, August 15, 2011

Little Details: The Coloring Books

We're going to have approximately 30-35 kids at our wedding reception, and I thought the parents might appreciate a few things to keep them occupied during the cocktail hour and dinner. I had seen some brides make entire kids' tables, complete with kraft paper table cloths and lots of fun crafts to keep the kids entertained. I LOVE that idea, but  I just couldn't make it work for our space/budget/guest list, so it was on to Plan B: a coloring book.


I took a bunch of clip art, added my own captions, and Voila! A coloring book emerged! Most of my clip art images came from www.elitedresses.com, and I used Discovery Education for the word search creator. Here is the draft of the book. At this point I had cut and pasted pages together so they were in the order I liked. Now, my next task (hopefully to be completed tonight or tomorrow) is to get them copied/printed.
The cover - I've already fixed the margin issue where the bell is cut off

Page 1 - Pay particular attention to how my and Josh's hair and outfits change throughout the book :)

Pages 2 & 3 - A maze to help the party bus get to the reception (Josh thought this was particularly funny), and a coloring page with a custom caption that tells what we're having to eat!

Pages 4 & 5 - Cutting the cake, and then a page for them to draw their own cake or cupcakes

Pages 6 & 7 - Josh and I sharing our first dance, and pictures of our ring bearers and flower girls, complete with their actual names! You can really see the shoddy construction of the draft version of the book here :)

Pages 8 & 9 - A word search with our names and wedding words, and a page for them to draw a picture of themselves and tear off to put in our card box for us! I'm excited to see some of the pictures we end up with

Then, of course, there was the question of what would be used to color with. We chose the good ole standby: Crayola Crayons! I waited for weeks for the packages of 8 crayons to go on sale for less than $1.00, but they never did, so we decided to buy the packs of 24 crayons (for $.40!) and divide them up into groups of 6.
Josh's sister dividing up crayons! Nobody wants all the ugly colors, so we made sure there was a good assortment in each batch!
We packed them into little plastic baggies and tied them with this ribbon that I scored at WalMart the day after Christmas for $1!
Our bag of lovely crayon packages!


This was a FUN project to do, and really didn't cost anything at all other than my time. So far, we've got $5 invested into crayons, bags, and ribbon, which I think is pretty good. Hopefully these are a hit with the kids because I'm pretty excited about them!

What are some fun, inexpensive, kid-friendly crafts or activities that you've used/heard of/liked when you were little?

2 comments:

  1. I did coloring books for my wedding too! I also bought cutesy stickers and dollar store toys for them. But we didn't have as many kids as you did!

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  2. so cute! wish we had kids at my wedding so I could have done something like this..haha! they will love it!

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