A prezzie to help you find your seat

Guests at our wedding are in for a few treats! There's the welcome bag, the escort card, the wrapped chocolate at their seat...

Yes, that's right. I said the escort card is a present. How so, you ask? Well, FMIL was dying to have these cute little wine corks be our favor:
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Adorable, yes. But really, if this were the favor at a wedding I was attending, would Ryan and I really both need one? No. So then you can place them between every plate on the table, which would imply that it's one per couple... but what happens when I seat two couples and four singles at a table? Way too much math for me. Plus, my own mom was in love with full-size silver wrapped chocolate bars, and I can't say I blame her. I mean, the wrapper proclaims our new last name in large script. Plus, Ryan and I are big chocolate lovers and don't usually call it a day until we've hard a least a nibble of the dark stuff, so the chocolate bars fit us well. And leaving one at each plate just made sense. So my mom ordered those for us, but that still left me with the dilemma of the wine corks. FMIL really, really wanted us to have them, and while I admit they did fit our color scheme and leaf was adorable, I just didn't think we had any place to put them.

I was, of course, very wrong and found the perfect use for them!! I was undecided how I was going to arrange the escort cards for a few reasons. The main reason was that while I like the look of little folded tents all in a row, that just wasn't going to be practical for us because the ceremony and cocktail hour need to happen in the same room and there's only about 20 minutes in between each event to flip the room. That means the escort cards have to be on a table behind the ballroom doors all set up and ready to be brought out into the atrium directly after the ceremony. In theory, the little cards would be all set up and two hotel people would veeery carefully move the table so that none of the little tents fall over. In reality, I am way too anal to leave that up to chance. So I tossed around a few ideas (none of them very good) and then it hit me:

Use the wine corks as escort cards! That way each single person gets one and each couple only gets one (as both of their names will be on the same escort card). Brilliant! Then I can just pile up the boxes to look like piles of gifts and if they shift while the table is being moved, no big deal.

In my head, here's how everything will go: Each boxed cork has a band of ribbon running around the length of the box, big enough to slip a folder card through. The escort cards will still look like little tents, as such:
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On the outside (where the white part is in the picture above) will be die cuts of leaves, one for each person (2 for a couple, 1 for a single). The leaves will be either a light gold (for chicken) or faded brown (for fish) and each persons name will be written on the card above the leave - my mom has some fancy handwriting so that'll be her job. She essentially follow the curve of each leave so that the name looks as if it's part of the design. Then the table name will go on the inside!

How fancy is that?! OK, so were the corks necessary? Probably not. But they made FMIL happy, I think they're adorable, and I know our wino friends will appreciate them. And we still get to have the chocolate favors... mission accomplished!