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Phew! Things have been pretty hectic lately.
By this time next week, Mr. Sushi and I will be relaxing (hopefully!) in Hawaii before the days leading up to our wedding. The last two weeks I’ve been confirming timelines, re-confirming vendors, finishing up small projects and basically trying to get organized. I’ve been running around like a headless chicken!
One of the smaller projects I’ve been working on are our OOT bags. I don’t plan on assembling them til we get to Oahu; there are still a few things I need to get for the bags that I plan on buying there. I’ve been working on a few lil’ details for the bags so I have less to do when we’re there, like name tags. Each bag will be “assigned” to a guest/family.
Or should I say boxes.
This has been done time and time again; Mrs. Lemon, Mrs. Hydrangea, Mrs. Onion, Mrs. Cream Puff, to name a few. If budget wasn’t an issue I’d wow our guests with Lauhala Tote Bags to hold our welcome bag contents.

But budget is an issue, so instead I’ll wow them with the affordable, ever so popular, gable boxes. Now before the wonderful world of weddingbee and the knot, I had never in my life ever heard of a gable box or knew what hell a gable was. I was lucky enough to buy a knottie’s left over gable boxes and paid about $ .76 a box (that includes shipping).

The lovely Miss Cupcake just wrote about personalizing her Out of Town Totes, and that reminded me that I never got around to writing about ours! I bought our plain canvas totes from cheaptotes.com several months ago for .99 cents a piece. It seems that they went up in price for a little while, but right now they’re on sale for .99 cents again! This is how the plain tote looks:
For a while, we thought we’d use gable boxes to hold welcome items for our out-of-town guests. Then, the fabulous Miss Sundae wrote about finding inexpensive canvas tote bags, and we swiftly changed our minds. Giving our guests bags that they could actually reuse sounded like a really cool idea, so we decided to go for it too.
The bags that Miss Sundae found were a little more expensive by the time I got around to buying them, so I found some similar 15″ x 16″ natural cotton tote bags from InGreetings.com for $0.94 a pop (now available for $0.98 each). The material was fairly thin, but overall we were impressed with the quality for the price. There were some slight variations in size from bag to bag, but other than that we didn’t have any problems, and delivery was very prompt.
I set to work trying to create a design for our bags that wouldn’t scream “THIS IS FROM OUR WEDDING” but instead would hopefully be something that people would reuse.
Read more…
Featured on Weddingbee
“Make an elegant invitation statement without the fuss. Stylish invitation sets with matching envelopes, reception and response cards included.”

Wanna hear a funny story? I thought you might.
We left for our honeymoon late on Monday night after our Saturday wedding. On Monday morning, I got a very strange phone call. “Hello, Ms. Cream Puff? This is [MIL Puff’s Name].” I thought to myself, “No, this is not MIL Puff. I know MIL Puff’s voice, and this is not MIL Puff. So who the heck is this?”
Read more…
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.
It seems like a few of us bees are at the same point in our wedding planning…so although you saw another post not too long ago about out-of-town bags, I gotta post mine, too. Momma Puff and I finished them during her visit, and we were quite proud of the finished product:
Mr. Canary and I are working on our guide to NYC to include on our wedding Web site and as a little pamphlet in our out-of-town bags. This is a great little pet project for Mr. Canary who loves to write, but also a lot of fun for both of us to reminisce about our favorite spots. I’ll post more on that when we’ve completed the project, but while we were compiling our list, one of my most favorite places in the city came to mind, The Strand Bookstore.
If you’re a New Yorker and a bibliophile like Mr. Canary and me, you’ll know why The Strand is a “must-visit” on our list. It was one of the first places I took Mr. Canary when he’d visit me during our summers in college. It’s the best no-frills shop… all about books (over 18 miles actually!)

The Strand circa 1938 {Image from here}
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