Wedding Wednesday: Welcome Bags

Putting together the Welcome Bags for our guests staying at the hotel turned out to be one of my favorite wedding tasks. 

My family and I went up to Lake Geneva on the Thursday before the big day and decided to stuff the bags in my parents room once we arrived. We had about 100 guests staying at the hotel so their big room filled up really, really quickly. 

 

 

For the actual bag we used a simple brown paper bag that my dad was able to get his hands on through his company and had Courtney Callahan (our stationer) make stickers to place in the middle.

Inside the bag my two "must have" items were a bag of Tyrrell's chips (my maiden name) and two Spotted Cow beers.

 

Neither were easy to come by. 

The chips are apparently a gourmet item and don't really come packaged in bulk. We ordered a few cases off of amazon that contained 6 bags, but for the most part my mom stocked up on them individually at World Market and Whole Foods.

The beer is only sold in Wisconsin so when we got to the hotel, my dad went to a grocery store and loaded up on a few dozen cases.

 

We ordered individual Advil packs off of Amazon, bought granola bars in bulk from Costco, included a resort map, and had welcome notes printed by Courtney. 

The bags were a lot of work but I think they ended up really personal, and actually useful. More than a few people after the wedding made comments about the "great beer" and "cute chips" - so I think they were a hit.

After our bag packing adventure it was nice to just hang out with my parents and sisters and lay low.

 I miss them like crazy right now.

We went to dinner that night, the 6 of us, and had such a good time. It's hard to get us all at a dinner table, and keep it just us, so it was a very cherished moment - especially during such a crazy weekend.

I really needed a few glasses of wine as my nerves were starting to kick in. We went around and told funny stories about Joel and I and just enjoyed one of the last nights of my single-ness.

 

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