brown paper program bags

So as already mentioned, by far my most favorite part of the wedding planning process was the creation of the ceremony.  After writing it from scratch, infusing it with as much KK-and-Stefan tid-bits as we could manage, we felt we needed a ceremony program equally as us.

 

During my hot-and-heavy inspiration gathering period, I stumbled across the following idea:

 

  

brown paper bag ceremony programs!

read more here

 

Not only did they fit perfectly with our kraft paper, approachable, rustic, not-too-many-frills theme, they were multi-purpose (we could fill them up with all sorts of goodies), inexpensive and - best of all - loads of fun.

 

Only problem was that printing on a brown paper bag poses quite a problem.

You can't run them through a printer. (Trust me, I tried.)

Kinkos/Copy Max/You-Name-It won't do it for you.  (Again, pleaded my heart out.)

And minimum order for an online brown paper bag print job is 100,000 bags.

 

So what to do (if you're not a professional silk-screener like the maker of the bags shown above)?

 

Enter: City Stamp n Sign.

For around $80 (for their largest, largest size), they will custom-make a stamp designed exactly to your specifications.  Instead of printing on the bags, we would STAMP on them.  Even more perfect.

(Except for my fabulous maid-of-honor and sister Gretchen who had to actually do the stamping.  Thanks Gretters!)

 

Inside our stamped brown paper bags, we included:

• Dried lavender for tossing
• Traditional Swiss wedding candies (an absolute MUST at any Swiss nuptials)
• A three-fold with:
• a welcome & thank-you from us,
• song lyrics for our two all-guest sing-alongs,
• a listing of our fabulous family and wedding party, and
• a little story on the history behind the lemonade stand
• A notecard + pen (Katherine & Stefan trademarked, of course, thanks to my fabulous mom who designed and ordered them in record time)
• We asked guests to pen us some marriage words of wisdom that were collected during the ceremony for a special box ceremony where everyone helped us prepare a box to break open when we begin to doubt this decision of ours.
• Inside the box we included the words of wisdom from all our guests, little tid-bits to help us remember good days together (our wedding invitation, our favorite Swiss chocolates, a newspaper from the hotel we stayed at the night we got engaged, among others), and an excellent bottle of wine to be enjoyed when needed.

 

 

While the stamping, folding, stuffing, assembling and clipping took my mom, sister, and I an entire night, I like to think it was worth it.

Check in tomorrow for some other ideas on how to be thrifty using custom-made stamps.

xoxo
KK