The Wedding Party

A result of our long friendship before we ever started dating, Ryan and I have a lot of mutual friends. For some reason, most of them are guys. This posed an interesting problem for picking our wedding party. Most of our friends get to stand on his side of the church, and he wanted to include a lot of them. I have 2 sisters, a future sister in law, and a few close girl friends that I wanted to be my maids, so I drew the line at 7. If I hadn't, we'd probably have 15 groomsmen, I'd be scrambling around asking people I barely know to be my bridesmaids, and they'd be hanging out into the aisles of the church during the ceremony. As it is, we'll fill up the stage and he can use everyone I wouldn't let him include as an usher so they still get to be a part of our day.

Once I picked my girls, I started thinking of ways to formally ask them (most of them knew they'd be in my wedding already) to be my bridesmaids. I like to be crafty, so I decided to make cards and write notes inside them all telling them exactly why I wanted them to be in my wedding. Some of the notes were long and mushy, some were short and sweet, but they were all heartfelt. For the actual cards, I saw a little doodle of a bride and her bridesmaids (on Etsy, I think) and decided to modify it for myself. I bought some blank cards and envelopes and drew a bride with a maid on either side of her on the front of the cards, I wrote my notes inside, and then colored one maid on each card to look like the recipient. I liked this, but they were still kind of lacking in color, so I found some paper with wedding doodles on it (cakes, champagne glasses, hearts, etc.) that were kind of in the same simple style as my bride drawing. I lined the envelopes with this paper, and the result was pretty darn cute, if I do say so myself. 

Ryan and his mom came up with the idea of giving the guys he wanted to be his groomsmen a bottle of whiskey, but customizing the labels with wedding stuff. We found a website that let you type in your own text, and it would put it on a Jack Daniel's label. We played around with it some, got a rough idea, and decided he could tweak the wording later. However, between our initial discovery of the site and the next time he tried to use it, Jack Daniel's apparently sent them a cease and desist order, so he had to go with our rough draft wording, that we had thankfully already saved, just in case. He just had the label printed on wallet sized photo paper and glued them to the bottles, and I think they turned out very nicely.