Wedding Wednesday: being a bridesmaid

The other day, someone told me I am "always a bridesmaid, never a bride". I wasn't upset or offended. I laughed! It's true.

I'm willing to bet there are a lot of gals out there who are current or soon-to-be maids of honor and bridesmaids. We need to stick together! I want to share some of the goodies and vendor info from this past weekend.

There are no words to convey quite how honored I am to be AEG's maid of honor. I'm also very fortunate to have a generous, thoughtful mother who offered to host her bridal shower.

I'm on a limited budget, so I had to be creative. For the shower, my mom handled the food and beverage. I was focused on the opening and closing details: the invitations and the party favors.

AEG and I both appreciate beautiful paper and so I searched high and low before settling on an invitation design. The invitations were absolutely adorable, but I wouldn't work with that particular vendor again. I ordered 25 invitations. I got the package a few days past the date I would have liked him, and there were 25 envelopes but only nine invitations. She accidentally left out the other 16 invitations (???). She overnighted the balance of the order, but the whole episode gave me awful anxiety. Woof.

I wanted cookie party favors, and after hearing a lot of good things about A Dozen Eggs, I decided to order from them. They were easy to work with, well-priced, and the cookies were absolutely delicious. This particular design has pink detailing on the website, but it was important to me to incorporate navy as it's the bridesmaid dress color and they were happy to make the switch. I will absolutely order from them again. For the quickest response, I suggest contacting them via email. I had a tough time getting through on the phone and they don't have e-commerce set up.

I wanted to do personalized purse goodies - lip balm and mints - as bachelorette party favors. (We instituted a No Male Genitalia Paraphernalia rule many moons ago.) I made custom lip balms via GCD Spa. I can't recommend them enough! They are so pleasant to work with and FAST. If you are in a time crunch, these are your gals! The lip balm is a really nice quality and the prices are great. This is the second time I've ordered from them and certainly not the last. They wrapped it up real cute too, as you can see.

Rather than order personalized mints, another bridesmaid and I decided to "make" our own. She is a graphic design maven and made labels to fit Altoids Smalls tins. They were perfect! If you order personalized mints online, the minimums are pretty high and I'm not sure how great the mints would taste. This method worked out really well for us.

All of these special touches really added to the weekend. I love that I can reach in my makeup bag and be reminded of the fun night we had by a lip balm or some mints.

My mom also ordered custom napkins that said "the soon to be... Mrs. _____" via The Stationary Studio and said they were great to work with. (The napkins were so stinkin' cute.)

If anyone wants to trade ideas or tips, leave a comment here or email me. I am personally loving this whole "always a bridesmaid" thing. File that one under things you never thought you'd hear me say!

I can't wait to see which of my friends gets engaged next! My money's on... well, she knows who she is. ;)