I found such an incredible amount of useful information in other brides’ planning threads that I just had to post my own. Thank you so much to all of you brides who blazed the trail with terrific ideas and a generous willingness to share them!
ATTIRE
My dress was an Allure, and the groom’s suit was from the Banana Republic Outlet – tailored to fit him perfectly. His tie was a Calvin Klein from Nordstrom Rack. My shoes were Coloriffics from zappos.com, which I had dyed to match his tie. I LOVED my shoes, but they were pretty much ruined from the rain water around the resort before the wedding even began. (Dyed shoes can’t get wet).
OOT BAGS
We had 42 guests and assembled an OOT bag for each room (approx 24 bags). All of our ideas came from the BDW forum. Thank you! Here’s what we included:
A. 2 tote bags – one designed for women and one designed for men. The men’s bags had the seal of Mexico and said our date in Spanish. The women’s bags had a lyric from our song on it.
One was the bag holding everything in it. The other was wrapped with a ribbon reading “To have and to hold… your stuff on the beach.” I designed everything in Publisher, and then used iron-on transfers. Using these transfers for 44 bags was a nightmare. If I could do it again, I would spend the extra $100 and just have them screen printed. I broke our glass table and burned myself doing these things! We sought to design these so that people would want to reuse them in the future, and figured that something with just our names or wedding logo might be less likely to be reused. In the end, the transferred images didn’t withstand water very well, so I’m not sure that they’ll be reused at all.
B. First aid kit in a baggie, tied with ribbon reading, “in sickness and in health” consisting of:
-2 hand sanitizers (approx. 20 cents each from Costco)
-A sleeve of 6 pepto bismol tablets
-A 24 pk of Walmart Ibuprofen (94c each)
-Roll of Alka seltzer tablets
-4 bandaids
-2 alcohol wipes
-2 Off! Bug repellant wipes
C. Fun stuff tied with ribbon and a note that said, “in good times and in bad”. It included:
- A deck of cards (we got 2packs in the dollar spot section of Target)
- 2 water guns (we got 4 for $1 at Dollar Tree)
- A booklet of Spanish phrases – a template that we altered to include some stuff including, “Lo siento, soy gringo” and other things.
- A stapled booklet of crosswords and games we made and others we copied from game books. We figured this would come in handy on a rainy day. The ones we liked were a bride and groom trivia crossword (for which we gave a prize to the first one to finish). It was sufficiently hard enough that you had to talk to other guests (from different aspects of our lives) in order to solve it. We hoped it encouraged mingling among our guests. We also made a word search with all of our guests’ names.
D. Our welcome letter with an agenda of the weekend’s events, and a map of the resort where we wrote in the locations of our events. We attached the letters with a ribbon to the bag’s handles with a note that said, “to love and to cherish… our friends and family.”
Looking forward to reading a review as well!
