I don't mean to brag with the title of this post but well, we did make some pretty kick-ass welcome bags. Buying the supplies and assembling them were tasks that we left until the week before the wedding, just to make that week that much more fun and not hectic or stressful at all :) We made a run to BJ's and went a little crazy in the snack aisle. Once the dust had settled, we hauled the following items out to my parent's station wagon:
Bottled water
Mini bags of Snyder's Pretzels
Wrigley's gum
Ghiradelli chocolates
Welch's fruit snacks
Starlite mints
Dum Dum lollipops
Planter's peanuts
Enough butter, flour, sugar and chocolate chips to bake over 300 chocolate chip cookies
All together, it looked like this:
So I don't know if you noticed but there was no theme or cohesive element to the items in our welcome bags (unless you count "stuffing your face" as a theme.) I wracked my brains but just could not come up with any local-inspired treats to put in the bags. The chocolate chip cookies were about the only homemade item we could manage, since we had 85 of the bags to make and deliver, which is a freakin' lot!
Check out my dad's handiwork, all packaged up (we bought clear cellophane bags from Michael's and gold twisties. Nothin' fancy but it did the job!)
Mmmmmmm, me loves cooookies!
Once everything was bought, we spent the Wednesday before the wedding assembling the bags. Here's Mom Trailmix sampling the Ghiradelli's (you know, to make sure it wasn't poisonous or anything...)
We put yellow and blue tissue paper in the bags and then I wrote a brief Thank You note on leftover pink cards that I hole punched and tied on to the bags with raffia. After I did this, we realized the pink sort of made the whole thing look like an Easter egg vomited everywhere so I ended up tucking the pink tags into the bags to preserve the color scheme (did I just type the phrase "Preserve the color scheme?" Yes, yes, I did. Gag.)
Here's Mr Trailmix, hard at work. Notice his jacket and jeans. Mother Nature was cruel to us the week before the wedding in spite of an unusually warm and sunny spring beforehand. On this particular day the high was 53 degrees and raining. Not a good omen for our outdoor wedding...
We delivered these bad boys on Thursday before the wedding and I was thankful to be rid of them. Even though they were a fairly expensive, time-consuming project (especially when you add in the time/cost it took me to decorate the stupid bags) I was really happy with the results and I think everyone appreciated having these waiting for them when they arrived at their hotel.
With the clock rapidly ticking down towards the big day, if felt good to be checking items off our list, left and right...
Our schedule for the week...
Next up, a few last minute fun details and pre-wedding festivities!
What did you put in your OOT bags? Anything homemade?
They look great! I'm sure your guests loved them! We're also planning to do OOT bags for OOT guests. I already found some maps and coupons for restaurants in the area of our wedding.
ReplyDeleteIf you don't mind me asking were you able to get a good deal on the white bags? If so, could you share the website/info. with me?
I can't wait to do out OOT bags and btw, I totally count "stuffing your face," a theme - it's one my family members would appreciate too!! I love snacking on a trip, and vending machines and fast food can be expensive. I'm sure they appreciated the treats. I think the bags looked beautiful too!
ReplyDeleteWe had always intended to do Out Of Town bags, I even had a few dozen sweet brown bags! But then, we ran out of money, umm...and errr.... out of time! so no out of town bags for our guests.
ReplyDeleteYours look awesome though!
I like the "stuffing your face" theme! :-D
ReplyDeleteAwesome! I'd like to do these, but I have a feeling I'll get really lazy...
ReplyDeleteNicole-Lynn, the bags were from Paper Mart (http://www.papermart.com/) and cost just under $40 for 120 bags!
ReplyDeleteThanks to everyone else for kind comments, xoxo! :)
Those look great. I was super excited about our OOT boxes (we used gable boxes), but then they ended up being useless at the end since most of our OOT guests stayed at family member's houses way out of the area so I didn't really have an opportunity to 'gift' them with them.
ReplyDeleteSince we also had a lot of OOT family in the bridal party, I just turned our OOT boxes into the Bridal Party Gift Boxes instead. We put their gifts in them with a few things like bottled water, mints with our names and date, some bandaids that were in a little tin that read "Hugs and Kisses from the Mr. & Mrs." and then a deck of cards since the fam are huge card players! :)
Sounds like you really took care of your OOT guests.