Just Days Before 'I Do': Running Around Like Crazy People

The weekend before our wedding is when the madness started.

A bunch of it is a blur to me, partly because of the fact that I was only able to get 3 or 4 hours of sleep each night the weeks leading up to our wedding, but also partly because I felt like we were moving a thousand miles a minute. The Cola house was a flurry of activity, and we spent a good two full days doing nothing but cleaning our home.

I’m not even kidding, it was that bad. Paper scraps, ribbon pieces, cat fur—our house was a tornado of wedding crafting supplies and trash, and it was a huge amount of work to get it cleaned. But as stressful as it was, it had to be done, because some of our wedding party was coming to town Tuesday night and staying with us for a couple nights.

(Side note: if you can avoid it, I would recommend against having people stay at your house right before your wedding. Cleaning for and entertaining guests adds a huge amount of stress, especially if you’re the type of person who always strives to be a good hostess, like I am. We had a lot of fun with our friends once they got here, so I totally don’t regret it, but it was a lot of work and stress leading up to when they arrived. I may or may not have snapped at one of my bridesmaids, via text, while she was waiting to board her plane to fly here….something along the lines of “You’ve already had TWO WEDDINGS, you should know how stressed I am.” Yeah, not a proud moment. Luckily she was understanding and texted me back something along the lines of how they were ready to help with whatever we needed, and would be our “wedding ninjas.”)

Mr. Cola had to work the Monday and Tuesday before our wedding, while I continued to zip around in a crazed daze, calling and emailing a million people and vendors to re-re-re confirm things, spending about 4 hours ironing all the clothes we both would wear for the rest of the week, finalizing my vows, checking and re-checking my mile long lists, putting together my emergency bag and packing for our Thursday through Sunday hotel stay, getting our cars cleaned and detailed for ferrying people around, getting a facial and wax at a salon (which was supposed to be an excuse to de-stress, but I ended up just feeling like it was a waste of time, I was greasy and gross after the facial, and immediately went home and showered off), and having to take loads of garbage to Mr. C’s work dumpster because we had too much to fit in our garbage can.

So pretty much from the Saturday through Tuesday afternoon before our wedding I was a sweaty, stressed, sleep deprived mess. I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a way around this either, most everything that could have done in advance had been done, but there were still just so many things that I couldn’t do until the week before when I finally had time off work.

Mr. C got off of work late Tuesday afternoon and spent some time finalizing his own vows while I started working on our favors. Back in October I’d decorated our favor boxes and made signs for the favors table, but since we were doing edible favors, the rest had to be left to the last minute. As a reminder, here is a picture of the mock up of our favor table I did last fall.

For our San Francisco White Cheddar Popcorn favor, we bought two big bags of the popcorn, and had to re-package it into small bags that would fit in our decorated boxes. I used a measuring cup to scoop out the popcorn, putting about 2 ½ cups in each favor bag.
(ZOMG, look, no cutting mat or other junk on our coffee table, and you can actually see the floor in our TV room!)

I also had made little stickers for the favor bags ahead of time by printing them out on sticker paper with my printer. I wanted to make sure people knew the popcorn was from San Francisco!

After stuffing 40 clear bags of popcorn, I had to put them in their pre-decorated boxes, which I sealed at the top using two punched flowers and a small brad.

By this time Mr. Cola had finished his vows (although I suspect he didn’t get choked up writing his like I did when writing mine!), and he kindly went and got us Arby’s sandwiches for dinner. Because yet again, I had forgotten to eat all day. After dinner he helped stuff our remaining favors, Ghiradelli Chocolates in gable boxes and San Francisco Cookie Company Chocolate Chip Cookies in square boxes.

After all the 120 favors were ready for our guests, we packed them in boxes and just as we were taping the boxes shut, three members of our wedding party arrived. They had great timing, although I only managed to hang out with them for an hour or so, I was falling asleep tired by 10pm and had to head to bed early! Wednesday was going to be a big day, with an early morning wake up call!

Favor-ful San Francisco Treats

So, on to what will go in our decorated favor boxes, San Francisco treats (and no, not Rice-A-Roni!).

At first I thought we'd do "SF Bay Area" favors, so we could incorporate something from Gilroy, CA, the garlic capital of the world, since garlic is my favorite food. I even ordered garlic almonds, garlic pistachios and garlic sesame sticks to try them, but none were that good, and they were pretty expensive. And the packaging wasn't that cute either, as you can see in these pictures I took. I not only wanted cute outer boxes, but a nice logo on the inner packaging too.


So with those not up to par, we moved on to all San Francisco favors.

Up first, we will have Ghiradelli Chocolate Squares. I will probably get a mix of two different flavored squares, and 5-6 squares will go in the gable boxes. I found bulk boxes online here for $43 per 120 squares.


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Next, I found yummy local cookies made by the San Francisco Cookie Company. We'll put two individually wrapped cookies in each of the square boxes (cookies are $1.50 each). They even sent us a nice note when we ordered a dozen to sample their chocolate chip cookies.


(photo by me)

And finally, we'll have a salty San Francisco option, for those guests who aren't feeling like something sweet, with Thatcher's Gourmet Popcorn in White Cheddar. I ordered several flavors and sizes from them, since we weren't sure which size would fit best in the bag boxes, but we liked the gourmet bag best because of the sticker with the Golden Gate Bridge on it.

(both popcorn pictures taken by me)

However, the bag is about twice as full/tall as it needs to be to fit into the bag box (a good deal for $2.79 though). So we'll either empty half the popcorn out before loading the bag box, or maybe just buy the popcorn in bulk and duplicate the sticker on the front, so we can put it in a smaller sized bags ourselves, I haven't decided yet.

Now that we know what will go in the favors, all that was left (other than to actually order them and stuff the boxes the Tues or Wed before the wedding) was to make cute signs to show our guests what the favors are (all the rest of these pics were taken by me too). Using more leftover paper, glue, and punches, I constructed these:


As well as this sign thanking our guests and encouraging them to choose a favor:

(hopefully this will reiterate that they need to choose a favor, not take all three. But we'll have a total of 120 favors for 100 people, so even if a couple people are greedy, we probably won't run out)

And finally, I had to make sure that everything would fit on the 4 foot table at our venue, so I did a mock up on the floor in our living room. This will be a handy picture to print out and include in the box of favors, so our DOC can set up everything as I have envisioned.


Will you be offering your guests more than one wedding favor to choose from?

Favor-ably Decorated Boxes

Since I love tying everything in our wedding together with our color scheme, I decided to use the purple punched flowers (from our STDs, among other things) and purple and green ribbon to decorate our favor boxes. And the ribbon was on sale even, for only $0.33 per spool, and I already had the purple paper for the flowers left over from other projects, so while time consuming, decorating these didn't cost much at all.

The bag boxes were decorated using 4 strips of ribbon that I glued to the inside of the center punched hole, and threaded through small hole punches I made on the sides, securing those ends with glue as well. I then used a punched flower on the front and back, attached with a bronze bracket, to hold the bag box closed (although I realized after doing a couple, it will be much easier to secure the brackets and flowers after putting the edible favors in the bag, next spring, so I saved them in a ziplock for later).


(yes, in my book a Mike's Hard beverage IS a craft supply!)



Not only were the square boxes the easiest to assemble, they were also the easiest to decorate, because I just took two strips of ribbon, wrapped and glued them around the bottom of the cover flap, and then put glue on 1/2 of a punched flower, and glued it to the top flap (so the flaps can still come apart, but the flower is centered).


The gable boxes took the longest because I had to thread the ribbon through punched holes and reach all the way in the boxes to pull the ribbon tight and glue it. I then glued 4 purple punched flowers to the front.


(don't mind the glue on my fingers, holding and gluing ribbon is a messy job!)


(I really liked my design of using small hole punches to allow me to only decorate the front of these boxes, making them even cheaper to decorate, since I was able to use a lot less ribbon than I would have if I'd wrapped it all the way around)

Now I've got to go put together a mock up of how these favor boxes will all be arranged on the table, with the signs, as well as reveal what will actually go in them!

Did you decorate your favor boxes to go with your color scheme or wedding theme?

Favor-able Boxes!

A while ago I wrote about how I was having second thoughts about what we wanted to do for favors, but I've finally figured them out...and it all started with the boxes!

I spent a very long time researching what I wanted to do for the packaging of the favors, even before figuring out what would go in them. All I knew was that I wanted them all to coordinate, since I was going to do a Choose Your Own Favor table, a la Martha:

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I found tons of cheap options, but they either didn't go with our color scheme, or didn't have three coordinating, but different containers. Until I found Bayleys Boxes! They have an amazing selection of different styles of boxes, and a wide variety of patterns, colors and textures. Although a bit more expensive than I was hoping for, I quickly ordered samples in textured brown of:

Large Bag Box ($1.17 each)


Large Square Box ($1.17 each)

And a Gable Box ($1.17 each)


To order a sample of 3 different boxes it was only $2.50, and I liked them so much that I ordered 51 of each (we only needed 40 of each, but you get a price break at 51, and I wanted a few extras in case I messed up anything).

These boxes all come flat, so you do have to fold them yourself, but it's pretty easy. Here are some montages of me folding and assembling the boxes I got in the textured chocolate brown, so you can see what they look like in the color I ordered.

First up, the Bag Box:


The square box:



And the Gable Box (Which was the hardest of the boxes because I had to hole punch it before assembling it for the decorations, and the bottom didn't seem to hold together as well as I'd have liked, so I had to add two strips of double sided tape to the bottom flaps):


Assembled favor boxes: check! But then I needed to decorate them of course, as well as nail down what to put in them but I'll save that for tomorrow's post.

Where did you find your containers for your favors?

Ugh, Favors.

Ugh. For some reason I've been having a really hard time coming up with something awesome and inexpensive for favors. All I know is there has to be an edible aspect, since that's the one thing people love most about favors.

When we first started planning the wedding, I thought, "Oh, just throw some purple m&ms in a box and be done with it." You might remember this from my PhotoShop Goodness post: Quick, simple, easy, and edible. But curses to all the wedding websites and blogs out there! The more I researched, the more stories about great favors I read. Everyone has like, different cajun spices because they met at a cajun restaurant, or so-and-so candy because they both love it, or Starbucks mugs because they both used to work there, or maple syrup from their parents maple trees, etc.

I'm jealous of everyone coming up with something cool and meaningful, but for the life of me I could not think of anything that would work for us! For a moment I thought Cougar Gold Cheese would be neat, since it's made at the college Mr. Cola and I met at, but it doesn't come in tiny containers (and I'm not going to mess with cutting up the big ones!).


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And we love garlic, but not everyone does (I would love to do a garlic buffet, instead of the popular candy buffets, but probably only about 1/6th of the guests would probably like that).

So, what to do?

Keep researching, obviously! And then, Martha came to the rescue again. I saw this super cute picture of a display of several different favors, allowing guests to choose their own. Brilliant!
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I LOVE this idea. It gives us the option to have several different (edible, of course) favors, as well as an excuse to make an interesting display table, freeing up space on the dining tables.

I've just found some cute boxes/container ideas that I ordered samples of, and will share those with you when they arrive. Now I just have to think up some ideas for what to put in the boxes! Maybe San Francisco area treats.....?

Did you struggle with an aspect of your wedding planning that you initially thought would be super easy?