Engagement Party: DIY Wine Tag Project

First – this is the view I woke up to this morning! A pretty blanket of snow and a blue sky with puffy white clouds hovering over our nation’s capitol -- beautiful!!

On to the reason for this post…..

Our engagement party is January 16 and my mom and I came up with a “icy-winter” theme (I like to refer to it as Narnia…you know, like the movie?! A winter wonderland pretty much!) We bought some really cool pieces that will bring this theme to life without looking like Christmas. Silver branches, hanging crystals, hanging icicles and some very “snowy” bird accents. My mom also found the most amazing little chandeliers (going with our theme) that will hang from one of the centerpieces. Each chandelier has beautiful crystals hanging from it and they are just so cute! We also polished up many of my mom’s beautiful silver frames which will each be filled with pictures of M. and me. And it must have been fate that I purchased the dress posted about HERE before even knowing what “theme” was that we were going to go with!!

I wanted to incorporate a DIY project into the party so I decided to make wine tags!! My mom picked up some nice medium weight white cardstock and we both picked out some simple iridescent beads (a pack that included four different sizes) and some easy-to-use floral wire/jewelry wire from our local craft store. Using photoshop I created a very simple design incorporating our motif (a chandelier), our first initials and the date of the party. I decided to use a silvery-gray color for the background and leave everything else in white…clean and simple.

While at the craft store we also picked up a round circle punch – the next step was to print out the design on the white cardstock and punch out the tags! After punching each tag out I grabbed a little hammer and one of my mom’s scrapbooking tools to punch out a tiny hole at the top of each tag, right above the start to the chandelier motif.

The next step was to figure out how the tags were going to attach. At first I strung on one medium sized bead, the tag, and another bead slightly smaller than the first, made sure the pieces were at the center of my cut piece of wire (about 4 inches long) and then overlapped the two ends so that the pieces were in their own little “compartment” so to speak. Next, I twisted the two overlapped pieces together until reaching the ends where I used a pair of needle nose pliers to bend the ends towards the twisted portion (this way there weren’t any sharp ends sticking out which would occur if you don’t bend them in). After finishing the first few, I started stringing on a few more beads with no real pattern, just three or four to each and I liked them a lot more than the ones with only two beads.

I love the way the tags turned out and I am so excited to attach them to the glasses, which, by the way is very simple:

Just hold your tag flat on the foot of your wine glass and wrap the tail around the glass until it is tight enough that it won’t slip off the stem of the glass.

I can’t wait to see all of the wine glasses lined up with my DIY tags at the party!!!

Happy Friday! We're off to NC for "Engaged Encounter"!!