seating arrangements

sunflower331

Hi everyone, I was just wondering when you usually start planning out the seating arrangements? Our wedding is in Sept '11 and we're asking that the RSVPs be back to us no later than 8/24/11.....do people usually wait to get the invitations or do they plan the seating arrangements before hand and if people don't show, just remove them from the table?  I want to give the person/company doing a seating cards plenty of time to do these b/c they're not your typical seating cards, they're a bit unique and take time.  Let me know what you did, are doing, think, etc....thanks

october010bride

We had a general idea of where people would sit but of course waited for final seating arrangements until after we received all of the RSVP's back.

Our seating chart was very easy because almost all of our guests fell into a group of 6 to 10 and those were the size of out tables.

If your arrangements are more difficult you could just do a mock-up of the space and delete people as needed- that could save you some time.

bmoruzzi

I actually used the seating chart function on the knot here.  Once you enter all your guests in, it's very easy to put in tables and then seat people around.  I started doing it before we got all our RSVPs back.  Then it was very easy to remove people and move others around.  I did my escort cards myself in one night, so I didn't have to tell anyone anything.  

JBs_Bride

We did our seating chart after we got a good percentage of ours back (around 3/4 of them). I used the seating chart tool on WeddingWire. I tried to use the one on TK, but I thought the one on WW worked better for me.

Karen's MOH

We didn't start on ours until we got most of the responses back. I thought it would have been way too annoying to be taking people out as they said no and things like that.

If your cards are complicated, could you start writing the names early, but wait to put the table numbers on them until you have all the responses back? I know we moved things around in the last few days.