Help us create the perfect Boston Guest Welcome Bag

I’m still looking for ideas for my Boston wedding hotel guest welcome bags. Fiance and I were talking and we thing going with edibles is the way to do it. You know the BostonBride is budget conscious, so here are some ideas she’s exploring:

• Plain old bottled water. Nothing beats a few bottles of free water when the hotel tries to charge you $5 for some!
• A couple bottles of Sam Adams!
• Boston Baked Beans. The candy! For $5, you can get a box of 24 small boxes.
• We’re thinking about Necco Wafers too, though not sure people will get that they are originally a locally made product. They are quite more expensive at $32 for 36. I’ve seen the mini rolls on eBay for $5 for 30ish.
• Boston Tea Party Tea

Any other ideas? What would you appreciate most if you were an out of town guest?

Cheap do it yourself wedding invitations – 50 for $20!!

I couldn’t believe it either. In my opinion, invites are not *the* most important part of your day as the stationary shops want you to believe. They are an accessory that sets a style and theme for your wedding, an accessory that most people will throw away.

I wanted an invite that was pretty and went with our theme, but I did not want to spend hundreds of dollars. I *really* wanted an enclosure, as I knew I would have to put some additional details in our wedding. EBay to the rescue! I found this great invite on eBay for less than $20 for 50 invites & response cards – and it included a pretty band to enclose the invite and additional pieces!

When I got the set in the mail, I saw some things that are hard to tell in the picture on eBay. First, the band had an iridescent glitter that I hated. I also wasn’t a fan of the chintzey bow. After brainstorming ideas on how to achieve a more elegant look, I decided to flip the band inside out, having the glitter face inside and pretty design still show up outside. (Notice the header on my blog is a scan of the same design….very cool!)

Here is what it looks like:

It’s hard to tell but the enclosure band has an ivory printed design that is also on the border of the invite and the response cards.

I printed them on my computer which worked great. I found a pretty font I liked and used the free Wilton print Word templates to build my invite. Here is what it came out looking like, minus a few details we cut from the picture:

The outer band covers all the text and also encloses the additional information sheet (which is an 8.5″ x 11″ resume paper folded in half with print on both sides, also made with Word) that fit perfectly with the invite.

The response cards and envelopes have a similar look and are also tucked inside the band. Finally, I hand addressed the envelopes with my own calligraphy pen to give it an additional enhanced look and used see through printed labels for the return envelopes and return address labels.

Since I did the envelopes by hand, I messed up a few too many and ordered an additional kit from eBay. With all the additional paper and enclosures, I used the material to build our favors as well.

We decided to go with a CD of our favorite mostly romantic songs. We have a Lighscribe enabled DVD burner, which we used to make these neat scribed labels on the DVDs with our picture and playlist:

We got 50 of them for $35 online, and the Lightscribe template software is free. This takes awhile, as each DVD is about 15 – 20 minutes to burn. Then, we burned our playlist, including a custom greeting we recorded and added to to beginning thanking our guests for coming.  We created pretty enclosures using the invitation kit from above and cheap white CD envelope sleeves (we got 100 for under $10 online also).

As you can see here, I opted to keep the iridescent glitter on the outside to make the set more fun and I did use the chintzey ribbon here to add detail. We used the round gold labels that came with the embosser we bought previously here. Due to the glittery surface, we needed to use a little Elmers glue to keep the sticker on properly, but in the end they look great. We did need to trim parts of the enclosure, given they aren’t the same size as the  invitations, but it worked great. We’re going to use the remaining blank invites for placecards, which I will also write out myself.

Save big money by DJing yourself

After hearing someone tell me $2,000 was a reasonable amount to pay for a good DJ, I decided we were going to DJ this wedding ourselves. First of all, we’re music junkies and have tons of digital music. Second, I used to occasionally DJ in a bar. Third, I’ve been to tons of weddings where I don’t remember the DJ saying much more than the wedding party intros and some general events through the night. So our plan of attack is to use the piped in stereo system our reception center has to offer. It sounds easy at first, but there are many considerations to this approach:

• Developing a dinner playlist and a dancing playlist. This is the fun part – getting to choose all your songs! We really can’t predict the exact moment our dancing will begin, so the playlists we are creating are large enough to cover the time. I suppose we could also loop a playlist as well.
• MCing reception activities. We’re recruiting an outgoing friend to announce our entrance to the reception. We’re hoping he won’t mind performing other MC duties, like “And now ladies and gentlemen, the cutting of the cake…” kinds of stuff.
• Switching music. We do plan to have an entrance song, a first dance, and then mother/son, father/daughter dances. In order to do this, we’re creating a 3rd special songs playlist which our MC will switch to when we’re ready.
• Test run. We will listen to our playlists in full before the wedding to ensure the music is issue-free. We will also get into our reception site beforehand to test our iPod docking and playing skills.
• Backup. What to do if the iPod croaks night of? Luckily the reception site also has a 5 disc changer which means we’ll be prepping those in advance as well!

So, it is a lot of work, but in the end it saves us $2000 and that is fabulous. Plus, we plan to use the music to make CD favors for our guests with personalized messages! Well worth it I think!

Which favor would you rather have?

I am trying to decide between two different favors and need your help.

1. A bottle of make-it-yourself Kahlua (recipe found here on MyOwnLabels.com). Kahlua recipe #2 looks better than #1, though #1 only takes 3 weeks and #2 takes 3 months. I like the bottle-it, label-it with cutesy labels, cork-it and foil wrap-it look. A lot!

2. These adorable little treasure chests (we have a luck theme intertwined in the Boston theme) filled with make-them-yourself truffles and stamped with our initials thanks to our new embosser. Only trouble with this is that you have to make them within a week and they should be refrigerated. Making truffles a week before the wedding is the last thing I will want to do! Another option is to fill them with chocolate gold coins. Do you think that is cute or tacky?

Basically, we are shooting for an elegant-old time-Boston theme. There will be lots of kids at the wedding though, so cordials will not be appropriate for all ages. Your thoughts?