A Uniquely Local Wedding: Part 1

As if launching this blog and moving into a brand new apartment wasn’t enough – my fiance actually proposed to me on the same day both of those things happened last August. It was amazing and perfect and I was thrilled, but nobody tells you how overwhelming it is. Especially when so many other changes are happening all at once!

We are young and engaged amid a pandemic and all around in no rush, and I have given us and myself so much grace when it comes to wedding planning. I haven’t done much, but one thing I was SO excited about was asking my bridesmaids (and parents and flower girl) to be in my wedding. So I did! And, if I don’t get a move on when it comes to everything else, they might not even have a weddings to be in 🙂

I’m sure you are all shoooocked to hear that I’m doing my very best to shop small and keep local vendors at the front of my mind through this process. And that of course – for me – started with bridesmaids gifts! The gifts I gave my girls were 90 percent made of entirely small business purchases (ya girl isn’t perfect y’all and the candles were ON SALE) and I was so happy with each and every item.

I will link everything in the captions. Leave a comment to let me know which items are your favorite!

Bridal Party

I’ve talked about this a little bit before, but it was important to me that the things in my bridesmaid boxes weren’t just weird crap that was going to get thrown away. I wanted them to either be things that could be used up or used outside of the context of my wedding. Nobody is going to wear a scrunchie that says ‘Mary’s Bridesmaid’ to the grocery store! I may not have hit the nail on the head with that 100% but here is what I ended up with.

Each bridesmaid box was customized with stickers (names were on the outside, title in the inside) and filled with a champagne toast candle, a “Bride Tribe” chapstick, a set of hair ties on a themed backing, a mini bottle of champagne with these adorable labels, a Save the Date magnet (I LOVED these) and a set of three cookies from my friend James – find him @mrbutterscotch on Instagram – complete with our date and the name of each girl!

Parents

I have a complicated family – to say the least! My parents divorced and both remarried to people I adore, then my father passed away when I was a teenager, another split happened somewhere in there and – long story short – I have a half dozen people filling parental roles for me. I’m extremely lucky in that regard, but it also means it makes things like a wedding a little more complicated than usual. After being convinced by my maid of honor (shout out Sara!) that it wouldn’t be weird to have two people do it, I asked both my mom and step dad to walk me down the aisle. For my mom, that meant a custom label for a bottle of Moët and for my step dad it meant these adorable cuff links in this perfect box!

Other folks

We have a few other people in our wedding we also wanted to do nice things for! I somehow ended up only with a photo of one of the gifts I bought, but I will just attach the product photos for the other things. I was so impressed with all of them! I actually haven’t given a few of these gifts yet, so act surprised, y’all.

We asked our flower girl to participate with this super cute puzzle – she’s 4. I also will have a Junior Bridesmaid in my wedding party, she’s 11, so I nixed the entire box and instead gave her a chapstick, hair ties and this cute bracelet with her initial on it! For our officiant – heyyy Ben! – I had one of these custom Woodward Reserve label made with his name, ours, our wedding date and location. I loved how it came out.