Confession: I have this horrible tendency to horribly overestimate my ability to complete tasks within a certain set of time restraints. Drying my hair, going to the grocery store, cleaning the house–I always seem to find myself midway through a project and breaking a sweat in dread of overrunning my deadline.

Fortunately, a weekend chock-full of wedding planning fun with the fiancé (I do, for Shayne’s sake, use the word “fun” here rather loosely. I’m about 99 percent positive that we would have both preferred a weekend outside, playing, hiking or taking long, summery, cat-naps, but we had work to do and we both made an effort to have fun doing it.) taught me a valuable lesson: when there are TWO of you working toward the end result, you reach the end result a lot more quickly. Unfortunately, this is a lesson I seem to need to relearn on an almost weekly basis.

Still, the weekend did result in the two of us putting another huge check mark on our to-do list (table numbers, done and done!) and, just in case you like our idea (we’re a little bit obsessed), here’s our very basic how-to:

Step one: Collect a lot of wine bottles. Especially if you would like them to all be uniform. This will take both time AND the consumption of adult beverages. Confession #2: we enlisted the help of several friends in collecting this many semi-uniform wine bottles. Wine-tasting party? Sounds like fun to me!

Step two: Clean the aforementioned bottles and remove the labels. This was done most easily, we discovered, with the one-two punch of a warm, soapy soak in the bathtub followed by an adhesive remover-assisted scrub and peel technique (we found our remover at Michael’s).

Step three: Design your labels. We used the same font as we used on our invitations (courtesy of dafont.com) and kept it pretty basic–our names, the date and location of our wedding and a very faded background image of the mountains. I also used Microsoft Word. Not very sophisticated, but it got the job done.

Step four: Using adhesive spray (we picked 3M, again, found at Michael’s), spray down the backs of your labels and glue them to your clean wine bottles. We used strips of masking tape on the bottles to make sure we placed our labels correctly, then pulled the tape once the glue dried.

Step five: Take a moment to step back and be proud of your finished product. A little bit of hard work, but if you have the time, totally worth the effort.

Making the table numbers from wine bottles was a blast. Sure, it took a little bit of elbow grease, but having a hand in the design of our wedding is so much fun–and working together to make that happen is even better.

Happy planning!