Wedding,  Wedding DIYs

Wedding DIY: Coloring Book Favors

Welcome back to my blog and yet ANOTHER wedding post 🙂 I hinted about this one in the last DIY post about our centerpieces – this one is all about the activity/coloring books we created as our favors!

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Just off to the side there – complete with packs of colored pencils! These activity books were pretty much entirely my mom’s idea. I got lots of her input for this post 🙂 These little activity books were very much just a fun, silly idea that kind of took on a mind of their own. I think they were a super cute addition to our reception!!

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It all started with one of our many internet searches for wedding things, all the way back to summer 2017 – about 8 months before the wedding. My mom saw someone on pinterest that had made activity pages to keep kids occupied during the wedding. (Mom says: this was a totally new thing for me. When we got married a hundred years ago, they didn’t have anything like this.) 😂

I liked the idea and my mom said she wanted to try and make them herself. This was low on my priority list in comparison to everything else so I said go for it! My mom thought that I secretly didn’t think she could pull it off but I knew she could haha. She actually got her first inspiration from these cupcakes on someone else’s book:

We were having cupcakes at our wedding, so she thought it would be a cute thing to include in the book. I love that a simple coloring book image of cupcakes inspired our stunning activity books!!

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Our actual cupcakes as mentioned from the coloring page!

Mom googled around (seems like that runs in the family…if you’ve read any of my other DIY posts you’ll know what I mean!) and found some super cute cupcakes to use as a coloring activity.

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One page quickly grew into two and three pages until suddenly it was turning into a full blown activity book. My mom tried to sneak in as many Disney-related things in the book as possible, because we weren’t having a lot of Disney things in the actual wedding and she wanted more hahaha. It was also around this time that mom mentioned she only anticipated printing a dozen or so of these books for the small number of kids we had attending the wedding…but I quickly let her know that I wanted all our adult friends to be able to color and do activities too! Now the pressure was on to make a super unique and cool coloring book for ALL our guests!

Mom sent over a draft of what she had so far: a pdf with a few pages of activities including a wedding word search, people bingo, and the cupcakes that started it all. The people bingo page was one of my favorites because it had questions themed to us and our wedding!

We loved it and also wanted to include a “how well do you know the bride and groom” type of game. The book was looking really good! But my mom is a perfectionist, and she still wasn’t 100% happy with it. She added a bunch of details, like cute page numbers and borders, and little Disney touches here and there.

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She also pulled inspiration from similar wedding books we saw online. One in particular had a story section about how the bride and groom met so she went that direction. My mom really wanted to include more Disney things, again, and make it more custom for us…and that’s how this two page center spread with custom illustrations came about:

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Before long we had eight panels with a story about how Chris and I met, all done with some of mom’s favorite Disney characters that she managed to sneak in 😉 She did of course ask for approval on all of this, but we loved it – I especially love the panel about how we love to visit Epcot haha. If you look at the panel for Lady & the Tramp you can also see that she sneaked in a little Teddy!! That Queen of Hearts panel was also a placeholder at first – but it ended up staying because we liked it too. My mom pretty much edited all these images to get them the way she wanted and she doesn’t even have photoshop??? She edited these in MICROSOFT WORD???? I don’t know how she did that but she DID THAT. The border here was also a custom Kaela’s Mom creation, complete with our monogram and some cute hearts.

She also made this super cute cover – it was really coming together!

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Finally the book was almost done, but it needed a back page of some kind because it had an odd number of pages at this point. Playing on the idea of the “just married” sign you might see in the back of a car, she threw in one final Disney touch with an image of Cinderella and Prince Charming in their wedding carriage.

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And wouldn’t you know it, lil Ted managed to sneak into this panel too! I know my mom had so much fun making these books for us – it started off as a silly little idea and I ended up really loving how they turned out.

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Do you know the answers??? The last question is my personal favorite

Mom figured out how to print them so all the pages printed out properly and we just used normal computer paper. During the week leading up to the wedding we started assembling the books – here’s Chris stapling some of them together:

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Once the coloring books were done, we realized that we had to give our guests something to color with!! Initially the idea was a package of crayons like you’d get at a restaurant or something, but finding tiny packs of crayons was actually pretty difficult. My mom is also partial to colored pencils as opposed to crayons…so colored pencils it was. Mom is also very extra like me so she took it upon herself to create packaging for all of the pencils. This was all turning into such an ordeal haha

For the packaging, we bought these little clear pillow boxes that were 3″ x 1″ x 5″. Mom also decorated them with custom printed labels with our names and the wedding date! For the pencils themselves, after a lot more time searching online she came across these mini pencils from Target. Unfortunately, they went out of stock and didn’t come back for ages, so it was back to the drawing board. Next up were these double sided pencils that my dad actually cut in half to make them work!! I cannot believe how much work my silly parents put into such a small project!

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This photo is from Chris’s little sister who still uses her colored pencils at home!!

Everything was almost done at this point!! It was decided that the packs would hold about 18 pencils of various colors, and my mom decided to be just a bit more extra and include pencil sharpeners in there. Because why wouldn’t we. Amazon delivered with these cheap, simple sharpeners.

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Labels, pillow boxes, pencil sharpeners and many colored pencils later we had the finished product! I honestly loved how this turned out – I think this type of thing really shows how ridiculous and silly my family is and how we put so much work into the simplest things sometimes, just because it’s fun. Our wedding activity books were definitely not traditional favors but I think they were super creative and unique and I absolutely love how the finished product turned out 🙂

That’s all for today’s wedding DIY post! I hope you enjoyed this post and be sure to check out my other DIYs and wedding posts if you did. More to come soon – we’re almost done with these wedding prep posts now! 😉

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