Let’s DIY some Wedding Welcome Bags

Wedding welcome bags are a big thing for weddings. But they are especially popular for destination weddings. They are a way to thank your guests for taking the time (and usually spending money) to travel to your big day. And they also make your guests feel appreciated for their efforts – and for being the most special people in your life.

Wedding welcome bags can be expensive though, unless you DIY part of them. If you’re on a budget, you can easily order regular gift bags, tissue paper, snack bags, etc. and print and cut the design elements. This way you can save money and put them together yourself for your guests. Here’s how to make wedding welcome bags.

What to include:

First, you’ll need to decide what you want to include in your welcome bags. You can go to Pinterest for thousands of ideas. Dollar Tree also has some items you can include, such as tissues, lip balm and even tissue paper for your bags. Then you’ll need to narrow it down to your favorite items. They all have to fit in the bag, of course!

Our Wedding Welcome bags included:

• a welcome letter
• a weekend itinerary
• hotel door hangers
• homemade bath bombs
• fire cracker snacks, (recipe here)
• koozies
• water bottles with a custom label and
• a local travel magazine

I received the magazines for free by calling the local travel office for the city where we were getting married. They gladly sent me as many as I needed and even shipped them to me for free!

What to Buy

Once you’ve narrowed down the items you want to include, you’ll need to order your bags, tissue paper and any other supplies you’ll need. I highly recommend Nashville Wraps because they have high quality supplies for a reasonable price. They are the company I used to order my gift bags and tissue paper, snack bags and cellophane bath bomb bags. Currently, the bag size I ordered costs $6.90 for 10 bags. That’s only .69 cents per bag! (No, this isn’t a sponsored post, I just really liked their stuff)!

What you can make

I created my own welcome bag stickers and cut them with my Silhouette Cameo. The design I used for the outer sticker on the bags isn’t for sale but I have created some destination wedding themed free labels that you can print and cut by hand or import into Cricut or Cameo machine software to cut out for you. Canva is another free app that has thousands of design templates for labels and tags and all sorts of stuff. If you’re not the design or techie type, or you want a different design or color, you can contact me at my LisasLifeTips Etsy shop and I can create a custom one for you to print and cut for $15.

In future posts, I’ll go over how I created the water bottle labels, koozie design, hotel Do Not Disturb signs, homemade bath bombs, welcome letter and weekend itineraries. And I’ll be throwing in some freebies for matching designs then as well! So be sure you’re subscribed to this blog and you’ll get notified when those posts come out.

Wrapping Them up

Narrowing down what to include in our bags was, by far, the hardest part for me. I found so many cute things I wanted to include from Pinterest but I couldn’t include them all. Of all the items in our welcome bags though, I’d have to say the most talked about and liked were the Cajun Fire Crackers. They should call them Crack Crackers because everyone loved them and many guests even contacted me for the recipe after the wedding was over! I have the recipe here if you’d like to try them. They are great for Christmas treats and parties as well. Don’t blame me when you’re asked for the recipe though!

Once you have all of your supplies at home and have printed your labels, welcome letters, etc., its time to put the bags together. For couples, I put 2 of each item in one bag and gave them a couples bag. This saved on bags, letters, itineraries and labels. Once everything is in the bag, stuff a couple of tissue papers into the top, and voilà, you’re done!

It’s hard to imagine that not long ago, save the dates weren’t a thing. You sent out invitations and RSVPs before the wedding, and your guests responded. Perhaps they marked their calendar from word of mouth.  But today, save the dates are extremely popular for all weddings and even more so for destination weddings! They are a great idea to give your guests a reminder to set aside time for your upcoming event.

It gives your guests time to plan ahead for your big day – book hotel rooms, make flight arrangements and take off of work, if necessary . It also gives you an opportunity to share your engagement photos in a unique way and creates excitement around your upcoming event . And there are so many different designs to choose from online, and so much fun to look through all of them!

If you are planning to DIY parts of your wedding, I highly suggest investing in a cutting machine like a Cricut or Silhouette Cameo. If you aren’t familiar with these machines, there are plenty of tutorials out there on YouTube and around the web but here’s one to get you started .

I fell in love with the airline boarding ticket design and decided to create one from scratch. Our Save the Dates were created using a Silhouette Cameo cutting machine and included a jacket to hold the ticket, a custom luggage tag and a magnet that I designed and bought from Vistaprint. (If you want to create this design, you can get the file at my Etsy shop here. It includes SVGs for cutting the ticket, the jacket and a #10 envelope).

Since we were having a destination wedding, I wanted to give my guests plenty of time to plan ahead if they wanted to attend. I decided to send out my save the dates nine months ahead of the wedding date, although many planners suggest one year in advance for a destination wedding. Keep in mind, you may need to know many of your wedding details before creating your save the date and will have to figure that into your timeline for sending.

You’ll want to have the details of the event, your theme, guest list and address list pretty much finalized before you start to create your save the dates. I decided to also place a map of the area, showing places to stay within a two-mile radius from the wedding and reception to make it easier on guests to book accommodations.

Find a map of the area online, take a screenshot of the map and add text and directional arrows in a free photo editing app (I used Font Candy), email the final photo to yourself – then print them to send with the save the dates. You could also make them into postcards and there are some reasonably prices ones at Vistaprint.

We also decided we wanted a magnet for our guests to place on their fridge as a reminder, and I came up with the below design to incorporate the magnet on the ticket. I bought the magnets for a reasonable price at Vistaprint ($16 for 50 magnets with a coupon) and I was able to highlight our favorite photo from our engagement shoot.

If you want to create this design, you can get it at my Etsy shop here. There are also great design ideas on Etsy, Zazzle, Vistaprint, Minted, Shutterfly and all over the internet. Just remember to have fun with it and create a wonderful memory!

How I DIY’ed My Destination Beach Wedding (Series)

One of the most important aspects of your wedding is the invitation. It sets the tone and style for the wedding. And it can also be one of the most expensive aspects of the wedding.

After researching many different variations of wedding invitations, I decided the tri-fold, pocket invitation style would work best for our destination wedding. Like most destination weddings, this was going to be a four-day affair and I needed the extra space in the invitation to include lots of details about the weekend.

During my online searching, Pinterest pinning and Etsy browsing, I quickly realized that I could save a ton of money by doing these myself! My best friend had a Silhouette Cameo and gave me an overview of how it works. I was so impressed, I decided to buy one for myself, and began the process of learning how to use the cutting machine and software. I ended up purchasing this one and I had the best time going to Hobby Lobby and Michael’s to pick out the paper I was going to use, learning the software and pouring through designs online until I found one I liked the most. If you’re new to designing invitations, as I was, some great resources were FontBundles.net, TheHungryJPEG.com and DesignBundles.net. They have freebies that are given out each week and I didn’t have to pay a dime for the fonts I used in my invitations or save-the-dates. And there are some great designs for inspiration too!

I then spent HOURS creating the perfect cutting design for my invitation. I searched online and just couldn’t find one that suited what I was looking for, so I created my own. I enjoyed the process and didn’t get too frustrated creating it (ok, maybe just a little) but it was well worth the time and effort to get to the end result. I do understand that most people will not want to create their own file from scratch and I do sell the digital files I created, for a discount here. I also sell them on Etsy at this link. One word of caution – doing your own invitations does take time! However, it is so rewarding to see your design come to life and to have the memory of doing it yourself, not to mention the money you’ll save! Here’s a YouTube video of me cutting the file for the wedding invitation jacket:

The inserts and invitation you see in the photo at the top of this page started out as blank rectangle cuts that I then designed and did a print and cut. Those files can be purchased at my Etsy shop as well. If you’d like me to do a video on how I did that, please comment below. Next week….the Save the Dates..