Wedding Gifts from the Heart and Hand

Can’t decide, what to get today’s Bride? Allow me to draw you a portrait that applies, statewide:

Today’s Bride
by Karin Sella Sloan

She’s getting married
She’s a little harried

After all, she is planning for her Big Day
The food must be gourmet, the music gay, and the timing A-OK
She and her fiancé still need to choose between the salmon and the filet
And though her bride-mania she might underplay
She spends sleepless nights fretting about her nosegay

Today’s Bride is quite particular. She is planning for the biggest event of her life and wants to make sure it is special and unique. Before she got engaged, she didn’t think she had a strong opinion about icing flavors or escort card font size…. but now that she has joined the Bridal ranks, some wedding magazine or bride blogger has indoctrinated her in the way of The Bride and she has become a die hard 12 point font advocate, partial to butter icing. Today’s Bride will spend an inordinate amount of time planning her Big Day and aiming for a one-of-a-kind affair.

So when it comes to finding her the perfect gift (s) (If you are a close friend or relative you’ll need an engagement gift, a bridal shower gift and a wedding gift) you’ll want to find something equally fabulous and unique that will help her through her wedding process. So why not put your scrapbooking skills to use and give her something from the heart and hand. Here are a few crafty ideas for personal, sentimental and FUNctional gifts:

Fancy Favors
The gracious bride gives her guests favors as tokens of her appreciation. Popular favors include Cd’s, candy (such as chocolate or Jordan Almonds) and mini matchbook albums. Her favors will go from ordinary to extraordinary if you create custom CD covers, decorate candy tins or make mini flip books in your Bride’s wedding colors. Embellish with ribbons, rhinestones and buttons and add guests’ names, the date and a sweet message.

Another idea: Stick with simple packaging for the favors themselves, and create exquisite tags for writing or printing guests’ names.

One-of-a-kind Invitations or Announcements
Brides need a variety of stationery items: announcements, invitations, save-the-dates and wedding programs. Each stationery item is important: the save-the-date gives guests their first hint of the festivities to come; Invitations set the mood and tone of the wedding; Programs allow the Bride to communicate the ceremony and special sentiments to the guests; And announcements spread the joy and excitement. You can help the Bride in her endeavor to make her stationery stand out by creating them yourself, or starting with invitations from a box and glamming them up with your personal embellishments. Add pressed flowers, emboss a monogram, decorate with ribbon or create a deckled edge. For a unique look, play around with shapes and sizes. (Just be aware that an irregular shape may require extra postage, so take the completed invitation to the post office to assess the exact cost.)

She’ll Thank with Swank
Let’s be frank. Every Bride appreciates the wonderful and generous gifts bestowed upon her. But writing a heartfelt “Thank You” for each and every gift can be daunting and tiring. That’s where you step in. A beautiful set of thank you cards sets her up in style. She’ll be more in the mood to write, inspired by your handiwork, and more importantly, won’t have as much pressure to wax poetic, since the card itself is already a work of art. Nicely done! One creative idea for personal thank you cards: start with an engagement or wedding photo, alter to add a nostalgic or romantic feel, and create a background or icon out of the photo.

Honeymoon Album
She’s packed her bags and she’s ready to go. All she can think about is relaxing with her honey and forgetting about lists! Help her remember to capture every moment of this special trip. Buy her a scrapbook, stickers, embellishment, a disposal camera if she is not bringing her own, and if she is heading of for a beach trip, an underwater disposable camera. Start the album by filling out a few of the first pages with pictures of the happy couple.

Want to make your Bride Misty-Eyed? Make her a Let-Me-Tell-You Bride-to-Be Gift
My personal favorite and the gift I give all of my beloved brides, is the Let-Me-Tell-You Bride-to-Be gift set. It’s a scrapbook that I created for my friends, to make it fun and easy for friends and family (of all creative levels) to share advice, humor and love in a useful and wonderful keepsake that the Bride can refer during her wedding process, and enjoy forever after. Now you can give the same gift, since we teamed up with EK Success to create the Bride-to-Be kit. Everything you need to make a gift for the Bride is included: 25 different pages with inspiring fill-in topics, 150 stickers, a letter to mail to friends and family explaining the concept, and a keepsake box with room to store additional memorabilia. The kit is the perfect bridal shower or bachelorette party starter, so we even included a game, and extra blank pages for free-style creativity. From my heart to your hands.

Karin Sella Sloan is the creator of Let-Me-Tell-You and author of Bride-to-Be. For more shower ideas visit her website at let-me-tell-you.com

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