Skip to main content

Wedding Season 101, Part 2 - GIFTS

Last week we started a Wedding Season 101 series of helpful hints for brides-to-be. We got married in 2006 and spent an entire year preparing. These tips are just my helpful hints that we discovered along the way for those of you who aren't enlisting the help of a wedding planner.

This week I've got two more ideas for you for the wedding-day party favors. We'd been to over twenty weddings before we got married ourselves, five or six just in the 18 months between our engagement and the I-Dos, so we gathered a good deal of ideas to sort through before we came up with our own. We'd seen rice sachets, seed packets, music cds, and beer cozies, and wanted to give something that people would definitely use but would still remember our wedding by without necessarily being reminded of it with the cheesy text "Andy and Craig's wedding day" on it. We wound up compromising.

1. First was my mother's great idea from her knitting closet. She wanted to give the 3 bridesmaids a shawl in case the weather was cold. Luckily she did because we actually got snow in September! The shawls were gorgeous; black and long and warm, and we gave them to them at the bridal shower so I wasn't the only one opening gifts. We took a picture of us in the shawls as well (I got one too!) and even sent it in to the magazine that mom got the pattern from. They printed it and we all got a copy of the picture.

But if you don't have a crafty relative on hand, buy something unique for the girls that isn't a pink shirt they'll never wear or a cast-iron faery they'll regift to someone else. These are your girls, and they deserve something thoughtful.

2. Second, I wanted to give everyone a gift bag so we started trolling for ideas for those. This took us a long time and wound up being slightly more expensive that we'd have liked, but any one of these ideas is great, so no need to do them all.

We wound up giving small lotion bottles made by a friend of mine, a small sachet of lavender for their pillows at night, a waterbottle with an image of our local mountains and some cheesy text but not much, and maps of the area. Everyone was suprised for the gifts and we still see those waterbottles around too. This was before the big plastic scare of late, so now we'd have to make sure they were BPA free.

We found out where most were staying and dropped the bags off at the hotel with their names on them. For couples, we just used one bag but threw two of everything in.


Next up: Wedding day decor. Stay tuned!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Gluten Free for Psoriasis

Recently I've been putting my researching brain cells to work on studying the Gluten Free way of life. Since the age of 14 I have had psoriasis, and recently it's been showing signs of progression to psoriatic arthritis, a progression that occurs in about 20-40% of the cases (studies are still incomplete, although the reverse is 80% of PA patients have had psoriasis, so the two are definitely linked). I've been tested for allergies in the 1980s (none), and I'm a pretty natural consumer as well, so I don't use body products with harmful ingredients like parabens or sulfates. Herbal and homeopathic remedies and dead sea salts have all helped reduce my inflammations, but have never eliminated the disorder completely. I was vegetarian for 7 years in the 1990s, and that never cleared up my psoriasis either. Because of its progression I've started researching the diet and how it relates to the disorder, and stumbled upon several articles and studies that now link...

DIY Bath Salts

A few weeks back I added two posts for making your own face products. Along that same home-factory-idea line is the typical bath salt. I laugh when I see them in the store for $15, when it's often only $1 of Epsom or Sea Salt and a few drops of essential oil, plus $10 of preservatives you DON'T want on your body! I making salt baths more regularly after a car accident several years ago that left my back in a pretty poor state of health. I was taking a pain-bath about 3-4x a week and it helped immensely. Now I take them for all sorts of reasons: relaxation, menstral cramps, headaches, chest colds, aching muscles, and psoriasis flare-ups. The salt is the base to this so let's start there! SALT First, all salts are sea salts either mined as rock or evaporated from the saline solution. Sea salt is sodium chloride, and is used in cooking and cosmetics. "Dead Sea Salt" is proven to have the highest content of body-healing minerals it it, from the Dead Sea. Table s...

My switch to all natural Henna - Part 1

Disclaimers A) The topic Henna is clouded by volumes of misinformation, and B) I'm no expert. Background I have been on a quest to go 100% "all natural" (in all aspects) for a decade, and hair color just happens to be my last chem standing. I have been DIYing bathroom and kitchen stuff for inside and outside the body for a very long time... but specifically within the last 4 years I have been doing so to manage- and hopefully remedy- two conditions I have developed, one recently, one a long time ago: psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis. I have tried gluten free, grain free, vegetarian, sobriety, urban farming... I have made DIY lotions, washes, cleaners, salves...  and because I believe others could benefit from what I've studied, I have been writing along the way ( arthritis , DIY , gluten free , grain-free, psoriasis , see list on page's bottom left for more). Topic So after a month's worth of extensive research on Henna, here's what I've found...