Weddingbee Blog

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 parents’ station wagon:

• Bottled water
• Mini bags of Snyder’s Pretzels
• Wrigley’s gum
• Ghirardelli 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 racked 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 Michaels 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 Trail Mix sampling the Ghirardelli’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 Trail Mix, 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?