Weddingbee Blog

As I’ve mentioned before, we’re doing Out-of-Town bags for all the guests who will be staying overnight in hotels on Kent Island for our wedding. While I’ve thought about the contents of those bags quite a few times over the past many months, one thing I’d never thought about was the bottled water.

I just thought, ‘okay, we’ll include two bottles per bag. Easy peasy, done deal.’ However here’s a conversation I had on gchat with my mom last week:

Mom: also, you didn’t answer about water bottle labels

Mom: can I help order labels?

me: I wasn’t planning on personalizing the water bottles

Mom: WHAT KIND OF BEE ARE YOU???

Mom: you can order them in a preset design and customize the label or get blank labels and print your own

me: I mean, I think personalized labels would be fun, but I think ordering them pre-made is expensive?

Mom: OK, leave the water bottle thing with me, and all I need to know is which bottle so I can get the right label size. I’ll check everything out.

That’s right folks, Mom Guinea Pig is bullying me into personalizing water bottles. Have I mentioned Mom GP is quite the party planner?

I realized that if I let Mom GP take care of this it would be a piece of cake.  All I needed to do was check the dimensions of a Costco brand water bottle (~8.2 inches around, 1.38 inches high), and pull several of our common design components together!  I quickly designed a few bottle labels and sent them off to her, leaving the rest in her capable hands.

They’re certainly not fancy and perhaps a graphic designer might shudder at the simplicity, but for something that took less than an hour for me to do, I think they’ll be a fun addition to the OOT bags.  I mostly pulled design components from the rest of our wedding: the stripe of dark blue with light blue on the first one mimics our program design (which I have yet to show you), the flower is from our invitations, the heart vector also from our programs and luminaries, and the cartoon from our save-the-dates! The fonts are also the same as our invites, and the other stripes and bubbles are just to keep things interesting

(The flower matches our invitations, the heart is used on the programs, and the cartoon is from our Save-the-Dates!)

(again the heart and flower elements… too bad you can’t see our names to balance things out!)

(What’s that you say? Too many hearts and flowers? Never!)

In case you had any question, our colors are blue and yellow, m’kay?

Mom GP ordered labels from onlinelabels.com, where they had a handy template for the labels that I used to make sure the dimensions were right.  Since Mom GP lives in California, she can’t exactly get a head start on putting these on water bottles, but she has them already printed and ready to go.  She even did a trial run to show me how great they look!

The best part is, this hardly added any cost - we were already going to buy the water bottles, so all it took was $15 to buy the blank labels (and now we have about 500 extra labels, sheesh)! Buying 140 bottles of water from Costco (4 cases of 35 bottles) was only $13.50. So total cost/bottle will be $0.20! Not too shabby!

Have you added any last minute, quick DIY projects to your list? Are you making the most of any designs/images you’re using in your wedding by using them repeatedly, for any project you can get your hands on now?

~~~

UPDATE: I originally included a label that used design elements from the very talented Inspired Bride.  I unfortunately was unaware that her free templates are ONLY meant to be used in whole, ‘as is’!  Since I took a few elements from a design and didn’t use it in whole, I have taken down that label and will not be using it on our water bottles.  So I’ll use this is a ‘teachable moment’ to fellow brides: read the Terms & Conditions of websites that upload free templates so you are sure you’re using them as the designer intended!  :D