I made my card box from 2 thick papered plain round boxes that I got at Michaels. I painted them in a French Blue acrylic paint, and then hot glued navy blue ribbon and assorted shells around the tops of the two boxes. A card slot was cut in the top of the larger bottom box and I edged that with an ivory colored ribbon. The box was set up on a special table at the RH that was right next to our sweetheart table. I think it looked great the way it was set up.
We made up gift bags for all of our OOT guests (which was for essentially 85 of our 91 total guests). They were oatmeal colored shopping bags that we got from
Uline. We then printed clear circular labels with our monogram (made for us by a good friend and one of our GM who is a graphic designer) and stuck one of these labels on each of the bags (we also used these bags with stickers to pack the children's activity/favor bags). The OOT bags were stuffed with some food items, bottled water with specially made labels, a LI visitors guide, map of Pt Jeff and train schedules. The bags were tied off with light blue ribbon and a little tag that had a message on them for our guests.
Our favors were made by my mom (bless her, cause I wouldn't have been able to do them with everything else going on). They were 2' glass votive candle holders that looked like flower pots. A small navy blue ribbon bow was hot glued to each and a small sea shell or star fish or sand dollar was glued onto the knot of each bow. In the bottom of each flower pot, was about 2 tablespoons of sea glass chips. On top of that, wrapped in tissue paper was a single
Narcissus Bulb. Tucked in on top of the bulb was a little poem and instruction sheet that explained how to force the bulb in the pot. Finally, the pots with bulbs were each placed in an ivory colored organza bag and tied with ribbon and thank you tags with our name and wedding date. They were placed at the tables in front of each place setting for the guests.
Our reception was a seated dinner, not a buffet, and guests had a choice of their entrees. I typed up the menu in a word document (two menus per 8.5x11' page), and printed them out on ivory colored linen paper. At the top of each menu was again the outline of the Scallop shell that was in our monogram. I also cut in half (vertically) sheets of navy colored linen card stock. After lining up the printed menus and the cut card stock, two holes were punched at the top and we used 1/4 inch navy colored organza ribbon and threaded 6' pieces through the holes to form a tie. The menus were tucked into each place setting's napkins. the girls at my office and I formed an assembly line to put these all together. Couldn't have done this without them!
My mom, again thankfully, designed and did our programs for our mass. She designed it in Word. I had started to do this myself (with all of the wonderful help I got from the ladies on here) but in the end, I was so busy trying to pack up things here for the trip to NY, it just didn't get done. So a big thank you to my mom! They were simple and really perfect. It helped everyone follow the mass (about a 1/4 of the congregation was not Catholic, and hadn't been to a mass before, let alone a nuptial mass) and they were just right.
We had some other things that were DIY too, but don't have the photos yet for them. I'll add to this later. This will also be copied into my eventual review, which I may get to before our 1 yr anniversary.
![]()
And all of these shots are from our photographer,
Stacey Ilyse who was just great and got lots of the wonderful details of the day.
![]()
