Our Travel Map Wedding Seating Chart – How to

When Mike and I were planning our wedding for May 2013, I came up with the idea to use one of our maps as a creative wedding seating chart. It turned out really well and people thought it was really cool, so I thought I would share it here in case anyone wanted to use it as inspiration for their own upcoming wedding. It was very simple to do, even for me, the least crafty person I know! (To be fair, it was even easier for us because we already had the map as the owners of pushpintravelmaps.com).

I started the process by finding simple white tags at Michaels that I was going to place on our Tan Ocean World Travel Map.  I then printed the names of each guest for each table on white paper, with the name of a city at the top that Mike and I had been to or were going to on our honeymoon.  This took a few tries to make sure that the names would fit on the tags.  I cut the paper to size and glued them to the tags (If I had better hand writing, I would have just written the names directly on the tags).  I then tied string through the hole at the top of each tag and used a map pin to secure the tag in place with the pin in the city correlating to the tag.  I then stretched the string across the map, tied a knot in the ends and secured it with another pin.  The string was necessary as it enabled me to give the map a more spread out look, as we were using places we have been, which would have been pretty concentrated in certain areas.

On the dinner tables, I used white frames I purchased at Ikea and filled them with black and white pictures of all the cities I was using on the seating chart.  I had photo shopped the name of each city on each picture, in my wedding color (teal), and the frames were placed in the middle of the table.  The guest could then look at the map seating chart, which was placed on an easel by the entrance, find their name and then go sit at the coordinating “city” table.  We thought it was a fun, unique way to share our love of travel and to get our guests talking to the other people at their table as an icebreaker of sorts!  “I have never been to Rome, have you?” etc.    We were really happy with how the map wedding seating chart worked and how it looked at our reception.  If you are thinking about doing something similar, feel free to let me know if you have any questions about how I put the whole thing together!