Weddingbee Blog
Whenever our family or friends come to visit Los Angeles, we heartily recommend the Magic Castle Hotel in Hollywood. They have the BEST customer service out there - our favorite element of which is the FREE, unlimited snack/beverage/DVD rental service they offer. Normally a diet coke is upwards of $2 at a hotel! Plus, in the summer, they bring popsicles out to the pool every hour - soooo nice. And, it’s affordable! So, when we needed to book a block of rooms for our wedding, naturally this was our first (and only) choice!
The location can’t be beat. It’s one block from the Walk of Fame and Mann’s Chinese Theatre (and Beard Papa, yo), right in the center of Hollywood. There’s a Metro stop right there for the intrepid adventurer who seeks a visit downtown or to North Hollywood but doesn’t want to drive (and really, what out-of-towner does?). It’s only a few blocks from our ceremony, and less than 2 miles from our reception - here’s to proximity!
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I had lunch with one of my bridal babes recently, and inevitably conversation turned towards the wedding. I have no idea how we got on the subject, but we started talking about valet services. Yes, you read that correctly – valet services.
The Club will provide one valet free of charge for our guests, and recommends that we have one for every 50 guests. I’ve signed us up for one more for sure, and two more are waiting in the wings just in case.
Along our wedding planning process, we’ve tried to put ourselves in the guests’ shoes. After all, this will be as much a day for them as it is for us! Here are some of the things we’ve put together to optimize their wedding guest experience:
1. Taxi Tags - we’ve already informed guests via our wedding website that the venue allows overnight parking if they need to take a cab home and advised them to carpool. A sober helper will be in charge of passing these out to guests who look like they can use a ride home after the wedding.
Kate Parker Weddings has over 20 great city/theme specific Out of Town Welcome Baskets. While these baskets are certainly out of my price range, ranging from $25-45 each + shipping, they are a great place to draw inspiration! Each basket is filled with locally made products and information specific to your wedding weekend.I love the “Green” Welcome Basket:
Considering all of our 90+ guests were all flying to Cancun for our wedding, we knew our OOT bags were not going to be an easy task.
First off, we had to decide on how big we actually wanted to make these babies, keeping in mind that we would have to transport them all the way down to Mexico. Initially, I was all about the canvas totes; then I realized we would have a hard time trying to fill them all considering we are staying at an all-inclusive resort. Bottles of water and anything your heart desires to drink is provided for at the resort. Not to mention there was no way in hell I was transporting bottles of water to Mexico! The resort is also all you can eat, so there was no need to load them with too many snacks. The hotel also provided all the toiletries you could ever need, including sunblock so we were left with only a few options.
I must have spent weeks deciding on which bags to buy. I eventually settled on these 7 1/4″ x 2″ x 7″ foam bags from Oriental Trading. I was expecting something more, but they served their purpose. There was no way we were bringing 90+ bags to Cancun, so I decided on getting 3 dozen bags. It came out to about one per family/room.
The other night on Miss Gingerbread’s BeeTV broadcast, a question was posed to us Bees with only a few days left until our weddings: “What did you want to do that you just didn’t get done?” I couldn’t really think of anything at the time, which I I took as a pretty awesome sign that I’ve actually finished up almost all of the projects that I wanted to do. Later on though, I realized that part of me does wish we were doing more for out of town baskets. I had big dreams (I never actually considered spending that much, don’t worry!), and saw some drool-worthy examples out there, but with around 50 parties of out-of-towners, it just wasn’t feasible to do much.
Mr. T and I decided that the most important things were to make our guests feel welcome, and to make their visit as easy as possible by providing them with all the important information. So, without further ado, I give you our very pared down welcome baskets folders.
Welcome to Maine, here’s a folder!
Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
Our wedding is WAY out in the middle of nowhere. I mean, it might as well be on the moon. The problem is if you Google or Mapquest directions to the site, they take you on a really unnecessarily difficult route to get there, so we’re directing our guests the easy, 3 turn way, which in the end, is a couple miles longer, yet gives people less of a chance to get lost than the Mapquest route.
I wanted to make some rustic looking signs pointing people in the right direction. Since the route that our guests are taking cuts through barns, pastures, and a couple of towns that have been frozen in time since the gold rush, I thought weathered looking signs would look nice and blend into the scenery nicely. Well, Home Depot doesn’t carry rustic wood. So using 3 ft pine steaks, pine planks, wood stain and white paint, we faked the weathered look.
We purchased some wood made for fencing, and had them cut at Home Depot. Mr. Penguin nailed the planks to 3 foot wood stakes.
For our OOT bags, I knew that I wanted to put in a couple of bottles of water with our logo on them. Since water doesn’t go bad, I figured I might as well get these knocked off my to do list. I decided to use Nestle bottles of water because the labels are the easiest to remove. I took off a label, measured it, and created a label with our monogram. I put about 6 labels on one sheet, then took them to Staples and had the labels printed on white paper that was waterproof (at $16 for 10 sheets, it was not cost efficient, so I probably wouldn’t chose this again in hindsight).
After cutting the labels, I ran 30 of them through the Xyron machine for an easy stick. We’re only expecting about 15 rooms for out of town guests, so I figured 30 bottles was a good start. It took me all of 20 minutes to unlabel and re-label the bottles. I made more labels than bottles of water, so if I need to get more water, it shouldn’t take long to recreate the end product. Here’s a little play by play:
A 30 pack of Nestle water, purchased from Sam’s Club for all of $4.
How do I know it’s getting close? Because the OOT bags are ready to go!! This was a long time coming, since those tote bags had been sitting here since December. And now I get to share the process!!
Step 1: Ordering totes. There were a few routes I was considering:
I thought these were super cute, and they’re only $2/piece for the large size. However, the “large” size is only 5×5x3, so definitely an option if you can control yourself on the stuffing. 
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I plan on providing all the guests staying in our hotel with “out of town” bags. I wanted to do something a little different, so I ordered canvas totes from cheaptotes.com. The basic cotton canvas totes are just 99 cents, so I figured I couldn’t go to wrong! I ordered just 5 to test them out, but liked them enough to order the rest.
My mom and I had an amazing meeting with our florist, Viv at Petal Play Designs, yesterday. I came equipped with my laptop so that I could show her all the photos that I have been collecting, as well as my room layout from Perfect Table Plan. We walked through our plans for the day and listed all the items that we will need to set every table. Viv is very conscious of my budget and so, to help offset some costs, I walked out of there with a long list of things to buy and to do. I am so excited that I can actually start moving on some of these things!
The three of us talked for a long time about bathroom baskets. My reception venue is owned by the Lincoln Park Zoo and the bathrooms have a bit of a public outdoor restroom feel to them. They have tried really hard to use nice finishes, but you can’t avoid the floor to ceiling tile. My mom has taken on the task of warming them up with candles and little floral arrangements as well as amenity baskets. Viv agreed to supply the decor and to help my mom collect any extra amenities at the end of the evening. That’s when she laid the bad news on us.
I’ve had my eye on everything at The MacBeth Collection for quite awhile, but I could never justify actually making a purchase. All of their stuff is painfully cute, but I didn’t actually need a damask trash can. Then a few weeks ago I came across a 25% off coupon, which got my wheels spinning, and the very next day someone suggested using the oval tubs for bathroom baskets at the wedding…purchase justified! I ordered this exact tub for the women’s bathroom:
I don’t know when or where she said it, but when Mrs. Bee said that her bathroom baskets were a saving grace to a few of her guests, it lodged firmly in my brain: MUST MAKE BATHROOM BASKETS.
As a destination bride, one of the things I have put a lot of thought into are my out-of-town bags since everyone is going to be from OOT.
One of the great things I’ve come across are personalized lip balms from Lip Balm Express!
Mama Sundae and I found this box at Hobby Lobby, but the first time we saw it I passed it up. When we went back and it was still there a few months later, on sale, I knew that I had to have it. It’s actually covered with a thick, almost canvas-like fabric and has some great grosgrain ribbon tied around it. Part of the reason I passed it up the first time is because I wasn’t sure what I would do with it. Then I realized that it would be the perfect box to house some black flip-flops and a sign that says “For Your Tired Toes” (or something along those lines).
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