cramming in the last-minute details

the week or so prior to leaving for hawaii were busy, to say the least.  we'd talked the old lady into doing goody bags for all of their guests, which would be distributed at the welcome/cocktail party on friday night, and so i'd been helping her with figuring out what to put in those.  they'd also originally brushed off the idea of doing wedding favors, but changed their minds with a little nudging there as well.  

this all makes me sound like a major MOBzilla, i know.  but with a destination wedding, the hub and i were really all about showing guests how much their presence is appreciated, and after we explained that to the bridal couple they got it and everyone was on the same page.

for the welcome bags, we found some super cute little woven tote bags that had a little clear pocket on the front that we could use to personalize it without it being a permanent fixture.  this way the guests would be able to use the bags later without, like, advertising the wedding or anything.  we decided to embroider the wedding logo on some basic cotton fabric, which the old lady cut out using pinking shears (to avoid fraying at the edges of the fabric).  and after spending some quality time with my machines...

this is how the bags turned out.

we ordered little tubes of sunscreen and packs of advil to put inside, along with some small-batch custom dole whip-flavored lip balm and pineapple scented hand sanitizer.  and then we made a batch of lilcee's furikake chex mix because it's so delicious and we wanted to share it with all of the guests:

after creating labels for the bags that included an ingredients list in case of allergies...

we had this cute little army of snack bags.

i had the old lady write up a little welcome note and weekend itinerary, which we printed up, cut to size and raided my paper source stash of goodies for these cute envelopes that i'd used years ago for the bean's birth announcements.  we slipped them in, stamped the front with the wedding logo and checked off another box on the list.

the fiance's mom had sent them a link to a small shop located on the north shore of o'ahu that did all natural handmade soap in all sorts of fun scents.  i had them pick a handful of different ones and ordered them to be delivered straight to the resort so that we didn't have to pack them in our luggage.  these were the tags that would be tied to the bags so that the guests would know what flavor they'd received:

the last thing on the list gave me a little anxiety, which is why i'd saved it for last.  heh.  the old lady had ordered simple satin robes to give the girls for getting ready on the wedding day, and she'd asked me to embroider their names on them.  this is not something i typically do - i'm always a little leery of doing things like alterations or embroidery on items because you really only get one shot at it.  and so when i finally sat down to tackle the task, i did a test stitch-out on some scrap material to see how it would look.  

after getting the thumbs-up from the old lady, i got to work on the first robe.  and of course...i fucked it up.  it was so crooked, and i was so annoyed because i'd done so much prep work and adjusting and moving and pinning and checking to make sure it was right.  UGH.

i ran right to amazon to order another robe to replace it because there was no way i could pick out those stitches to redo, and was super relieved when i found it available for shipping with delivery the next day.  i managed to figure it out so that the other two came out perfectly, and now i know for sure that i'm never taking orders to embroider stuff like that.  too stressful.

we packed everything up to ship out to the resort, and then all we had to do was wait till it was time to go.

ah, wedding planning.  so fun, so stressful, so glad it's over.