Weddingbee Blog

As I’ve mentioned, I’m a wedding pro. This status also comes with wedding-shower pro and bachelorette-party pro patches for my wedding-pro sash.

With that I must state, for the record, that I consider my “expertise” to be more as a wedding guest or bridesmaid rather than a bride. So, through this blog, I want to share some experiences/activities from that side of the altar.

We’ll start with the fun events—bachelorettes and bridal showers. Since many of my friends all know each other (albeit loosely in some cases), I’ve needed to get creative with gifts for these events (don’t want to be that girl who always gives a toaster). Last summer, I attended three bachelorettes within a short period of time, and I wondered whether I could stretch a good idea for their gifts.* In the land of Facebook (where everybody is friends), you always worry a photo’s going to pop up and ruin the surprise! Luckily, these ladies ran within different circles, so I felt pretty safe.

The lingerie showers were part of their “last weekends” as single ladies (cue Beyonce). I don’t have much love for the risque, but I do enjoy personalizing gifts and getting creative (plus shopping for fun underwear). Thus, I embarked on “Operation Personalized Panty Present” production.

I started by purchasing lots of underwear, both online and in store, all on sale. When shopping, I thought of a few common pairs for each of the girls, plus those that would be more fitting for their personalities. This meant that a lot of my floor was covered with lots of these during my weekend project:

Mr. Turkey didn’t understand…at all.

The next step was to organize the underwear into three piles (one for each bride) and determine what they could signify (bridal pair, sexy pair, granny style, etc.). I then started to brainstorm short poems to accompany each pair. I looked online for some inspiration** but ended up making up some myself and adjusting others to be more fitting. You can see that some level of planning is required to get the “right” pairs of underwear. Side note: I hate the word “panty,” but I forced myself to get over this for the purposes of the gift.

I then hit up my scrapbook supplies to make tags and pull everything together. I used decorative scissors to cut the scrapbook paper, regular scissors to cut the printer paper (when necessary), a punch to make a hole, and ribbons to tie the tags to the underwear. I used markers to call out the bride and groom’s names and a pen to write the rest of the poem. Here are some of the tags I made.

Intro tag

To represent a baby on the way

For each bride, I did something a little different for the final product. For one, I made it look like a parfait in a vase; for another, I tied each of the pairs of underwear together; and for the last, I used a gift bag. I can’t decide which one was my favorite!

Kind of looks like a parfait!

Gift bag—simple, chic, easy

Although each shower had the bride guess who certain gifts were from, this present easily exposed the giver. (I have distinctive handwriting.) If you want to keep your identity hidden, I’d recommend you type out the poems. Either way, it seems as though the brides enjoyed their gifts, don’t you agree?

Bride L, reading down the line

Finally, in the spirit of full disclosure, working on this project means this for your floor:

Do you have a favorite version? Would you do this for a bachelorette?

*I also stretched this to a lingerie shower a couple months ago. Shhhhh!

**I think my Google searches were “lingerie shower gift” and “panty poem.”