Welcome! Here are some gifts...

Two days before the wedding we hosted a Welcome BBQ for our guests. Really, it was a way to spend some time with everyone and to let everyone meet and get to know each other a little better before the wedding.

Let me start by saying that our welcome BBQ did NOT go as smoothly as planned. First off, the weather in Hawaii, while we were there, was extremely windy and more rainy than usual (even considering that Hawaii is usually quite rainy in the winter). We had our BBQ held at Bellows, which is an Air Force owned beach. I thought I had done my part and did all the legal paperwork to host our event there. I had to collect all of our guest’s driver’s license number and their vehicle information and fax it to Bellow’s security forces 48 hours before the event. The day of the event, my family and I get to Bellows and check in. It was soooo incredibly windy that we were afraid everything was going to blow off the tables and it definitely was too cold and windy to take a dip in the ocean. As the guests start to arrive, my dad and I start to get hounded by phone calls. The guard at the gate won’t let them on the post. We had about 11 people that were stuck…off base. When I checked in for our pavilion by the beach, they forgot to inform me that I also had to check in with security forces to confirm the guest list I faxed them 2 days prior. Needless to say, one of the guests waiting outside the base is in the Army and he ended up signing everyone in as his guest. So 30 minutes later, everyone was on the post and starting to enjoy themselves.

Unfortunately I was enjoying the day more than documenting it, so I don’t have many photos of the BBQ. :o( Here are the few photos we do have:

Mr. Mek adores the kiddies:


We got the buckets for $1 from Michaels and put cookies, stickers, coloring books and crayons inside for the kiddies. The kids put the buckets to good use!

See how windy it was. There was no beach swimming on this day. :o(

I didn’t even take photos of the welcome boxes I made for everyone. But I luckily one of our guests did:

(rocks were placed in each welcome box so they wouldn't fly away at the BBQ)

There was some variation to each box, but some of things we provided were:

• Cookies from the Honolulu Cookie Company
• Map of Oahu
• Crossword Puzzle
• Beach Ball
• Water Gun
• Playing Cards
• Postcards
• Stickers
• Hershey Kisses (to rep' Hershey, PA)
• "Survival Kit" (included Spongebob and Hello Kitty band aids and Tylenol)
• Photo sharing Card/Instructions
• welcome letter with wedding day timeline (vector images from www.istockphoto.com)

While I didn’t have "official" bridesmaids, I did have my two oldest and bestest friends in tow. So, to show my appreciation of them over the years, I made them their own little gift bags. My main gift to them was a blurb book I made to showcase our friendship over the past 16 years. It took months to put together. Without them knowing exactly what I was doing, I asked them to send me photos of us and letters we wrote to each other over the years. Here’s how it turned out:

Amariah Rauscher from ollie ollie drew me this great illustration, which I used for the cover of the book.
On the first pages I indtroduced ourselves. "These are a few of my favorite things....when I was 13." In our middle school days, we passed around a lot of slam books, so I used the infomation from them to add to this page. I scanned in our signatures from old letters and added an old yearbook photo from our tween/early teen years.

There were lots of photos from our early teen years...

and I went through TONS of old letters, picked out the best ones and added them too.

I also made sure to add our most current accomplishments and milestones.

I ended the book with a poem of friendship and a photo of us when we were 18.

So while our BBQ wasn't the fun in the sun I was hoping for, I did get to thank all of our guests for joining us in Hawaii with lil' gifts. :o)

Out of Town Prep Work

Phew! Things have been pretty hectic lately.

By this time next week, Mr. Mek 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 till 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.

I put the guest's name in Hawaiian of the tags for fun.

Postcards are also going in our OOT bags; knottie plumeriapal was my inspiration. A friend mailed me vintage inspired Hawaiian postcards from Walmart in Hawaii and I got the glassine envelopes from Paper Presentation. I put Mr. Mek to work and he addressed one postcard for each guest/family with our address, so they can easily mail a postcard back to us. Another postcard was given to them to send or keep for themselves. All were pre-stamped.

My inspiration, knottie plumeriapal

My postcards:

These are the"instructions" we put with the postcards.

Other tedious prep work I've been doing is cutting labels and ribbon for easy assembly later.

*note when pre-cutting ribbon, use a lighter to singe the ends so they don't fray. After cutting ribbon to my desired length I re-wrapped the ribbon around the spool to keep the ribbon nice an unwrinkled while crammed in our luggage.

Save your Gocco Screens.

Somewhere I had heard a rumor that you can save your already burned Gocco screens in case you wanted to print the same design on a different day. Well, I put this rumor to the test and succeeded! Remember my return addy I printed on my invitations? I just didn't feel right tossing the screen in the trash when I was done, so instead I wrapped the screen in saran wrap and stuck it in the freezer. I was too lazy to clean the screen, so I didn't I wrapped it up and stuck in the freezer, paint and all.



Six weeks later, I pulled the screen out of the freezer, let it defrost for about an hour or two, then started printing away. It worked with no issues at all!

Worked like a charm!

Now I have envelopes for thank you cards already pre-printed with our return addy. I didn't even have to add any ink. How's that for recycling!

Inserts and Price Breakdown

Insert wise, I wanted to keep our invites clutter free. I figure that if there was any additional information that I needed to send out I could mail out later to my confirmed guests.

First, to answer a couple questions:
Mochacoca asked, "Looks great did you Gocco everything? I can’t wait till I pull out my Gocco. I have been stocking up on supplies"

Answer: I did not Gocco everything. I've been trying to save and savor my supplies so I printed the invite, inserts and labels with a laser printer. The only thing I did Gocco was the return addy on the envelope. I do plan on Gocco-ing thank you note cards though and can't wait to do so!

bugaboo said, "I would love to learn more about the wording you used on your invitation if you don’t mind sharing; it seems to be uniquely worded and I just love that!"

Answer: When I was searching for the right wording for our wedding invites, I wanted something heartfelt, not too, too cheesy and nothing that refers to "Husband and Wife". Verse it has some great suggestions and many, many verses to choose from.

Our invite wording:
Please accept our invitation to join family and friends, in witnessing the sanctity of our love, devotion and dedication to our new life.

For a better view of how I organized the wording:


Onto the inserts.
Although majority of our guests are from the mainland, we do have a few local Hawaii guests that we are inviting so we made two versions of our postcard RSVPs; one for the local guests and one for the OOT guests. The OOT RSVP has a spot for the guest to put when they are arriving and where they will be staying at. We're getting married on a weekday rather than a weekend, so for our local Hawaii guests we gave them the option of coming to the ceremony and/or the dinner afterwards. Our ceremony is during regular work hours, so we had to factor in that our local guests might not want to take off of work to come to the ceremony, but might be willing to join us for the dinner later.

OOT RSVP

Local RSVP

The back of our RSVP postcard was the same for both cards. It just had our return address and a spot for our guests to write something back to us.

We also had an invite and directions insert to our Welcome BBQ.

As a budget bride, I can't go on without sharing the price breakdown:

Bright White Linen Cardstock (100pk)	Paper and More	$15.99
Japanese Paper (5- 25 1/2" x 19"sheets)	Paper Source	$47.00
60 Jackets	Paper Presentation	$79.40
Envelopes (2-50 packs)	Paper Presentation	$27.35
TOTAL Total includes shipping		$169.74

That equals out to $2.83 an invite. Plus Postage and Gocco supplies.

And I still have left over paper and envelopes for future projects.

Could I have made them cheaper? Sure. But for being "custom", I think I did pretty good on price.

You're Invited!

So let me start the New Year for apologizing for my...um...lack of existence lately. The holidays swallowed me whole and just finally spit me out. My last post left off with the send off of my invites. This is the follow up...my invites!

These are the labels that I wrote to Miss Etiquette about. I printed these out on 8.5x11 label sheets (6 on a sheet). Mr. Mek and I cut them out individually by hand. I am sooo glad we did; I might be a lil' biased, but I think they came out quite nicely.

Return addy was gocco'd on the back of the envelope.

This is what the guest pulls out of the envelope. A jacket, complete with bellyband!

Invites gets pulled out of jacket and ta da..."You're Invited!"

Close up of our invite; it's printed on bright white linen paper.

Next up: the inserts.

Invite Prep

Without showing the whole entire invite, just yet, my invite inspiration is a combo of:

knottie: redshoegirl

+

source

Sheesh! Invite prep takes a loooong time. And I'm not just talking about making an invite list and trying to gather address from everyone (although that takes forever too!). Here's a lil' of what I've been doing the past few weeks...

My supplies: Jacket Invites, Pretty Japanese Paper, ATG 700 tape gun and a trusty paper cutter.

Apply tape across opening of Jacket invites

Stick pre-cut liners inside Jacket and on top of tape.

Rub off extra tape.

Tada!

Now for the belly bands.

Before (Japanese Paper and shimmery paper)

After!
(our names will be on the bellyband, the alias was photoshopped on)

Of course none of this was difficult, just a lil' tedious (and repetitive). Nothing a new episodes of reality TV couldn't entertain me through.

How much prep work are you doing on your DIY items?

"Aloha! Welcome to Hawaii" Bags

Or should I say boxes.

I've already talked about our Welcome BBQ, now I'm on to how to greet our guests with much aloha (love). Welcome bags! 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 my guests with Lauhala Tote Bags to hold my welcome bag contents.

source

But budget is an issue, so instead I'll wow them with much 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 knotties left over gable boxes and paid about .76 a box (that includes shipping).

Now for my "wow". Jon, who also did an illustration for my STDs, made these ohhh sooo cute "cut out" cartoons of Mr. Mek and I.

I love being clipart! I threw this illustration over an old postcard I had scanned in (I lowered the opacity of the postcard) and ta da...

Well..there was some ribbon added for pizazz.

Close up of illustration. It's about 4x5 in size and I printed 4 on 8x10 label sheets.

This photo is for aesthetics, I used double sided tape to attach the ribbon to the box.

Future Posts:
OOT box contents