V's Wedding: Welcome Bags and Favors

As I have probably mentioned, my friends Virginia and Dan threw a very personalized wedding. They set their own rules, customized their day, and tried to make sure that the components of the event felt personalized. They had guests coming from all over the country (with a large contingent coming in from the Midwest) to their Connecticut wedding, so they wanted to make sure that each guest felt personally welcomed. We assembled these bags on the Thursday leading up their wedding in late June and filled them with a local specialty, fudge from the Guilford Village Chocolatier, and a perennial favorite, champagne (with two plastic flutes). We kept things simple and added a simple embellishment of paper lace ribbon to a kraft paper bag, then fluffed out a bit of tissue for the top. As someone who got one of the bags, I can vouch that the treats were very much appreciated!

One of the other projects we did—the most labor intensive by far—was to make these British style crackers that went on each place setting. Crackers are traditionally used on holidays as a sort of a toast. Guests all link hands (crossing their own arms in front of them, holding one end of their cracker in one hand, and the end of their neighbors in the other) and pull very hard as they are told to. Paper, ribbons and trinkets inside fly all about, which is fun in itself! But then you also get a paper crown to wear, which is my favorite part.

Virginia's mom side of the family is British, so crackers have always been part of celebrations in their house and she and Dan thought it would be a nice way to bring a hint of that heritage to CT. Plus, they knew it would be fun, and awesome to have their wedding guests sporting paper crowns (which we all did—more pictures coming soon, I promise!).

But the assembly of the crowns was involved and while I was skeptical (I hadn't realized how involved they were to make until I actually sat down to figure them out by taking a part a Christmas cracker) that we'd be able to make them look entirely professional, I actually think that we did a wonderful job.

Here you can see some of the components—the crowns, the thank you cartoon that went inside of each one that also told the guests where a donation had been made in their honor, over 300 cardboard squares which made up the crackers themselves, and ribbon for each end.

We wrapped them in kraft paper, added a length of paper lace and stamped a small label with "surprise inside". It was a very successful project that truly helped make the wedding unique. I will be sharing 3 more wedding posts when I get my hands on the professional pictures that were taken—so you can expect to see more about the flowers and centerpieces, the decor, info on the delicious local meal, and probably a picture or two of the happy couple so you can see what they were wearing!

P.S. I'm not including instructions here for how exactly we made the crackers because I don't expect many of you to attempt this. But, if you do want to know how, email me and I'll be happy to help!!