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From Bayside Bride, here’s a couple who really made their guests feel more at home, as they arrived at their St. Michael’s wedding:
To welcome our guests before the big day, we held a rehearsal party at the Harbour Inn Hotel in St. Michaels, Maryland. With everyone coming from out of town, we thought it would be a great opportunity for people to meet before the wedding and for us to catch up with friends and family we don’t often get to see. The party started just before sundown in the hotel’s beautiful upstairs dining room overlooking the St. Michaels marina. Classic Eastern Shore favorites like corn and crab fritters and cream of crab soup were served alongside a selection of local microbrews and mint julep cocktails. We used plucky little flags with vintage maps of London to describe each dish, and filled tote bags with personalized crab mallets, mouth-watering Celtic sea salt caramels, and festive maps listing the weekends’ events to greet our guests.
We spent the evening introducing our guests—many of whom had traveled across the country and from Europe to be with us—to one another. Everyone enjoyed getting to know St. Michaels and we loved hosting a casual reception before the more formal wedding celebration. By the end of the night, we were even more excited about our wedding and couldn’t wait for the next day!
Photography by Jacqueline Schmitz Wedding Photography, via Bayside Bride
Via 100 Layer Cake:
They had sweatshirts printed as guest favors…because aren’t they the quintessential summer vacation on Martha’s Vineyard souvenir?
Photography by Our Labor of Love
One of the biggest challenges we faced in getting our welcome bags to guests was that, during the course of a four-day Indian wedding, not everyone arrived on the same date. We were occupied with a million other things (well, getting married for one) - so how to make sure that everyone gets one?
This couple, featured on Style Me Pretty, faced a similar challenge - they didn’t have a dedicated hotel for all guests. Check out how they handled it:
…we made “Farewell Gifts” instead of “Welcome Gifts” because everyone was traveling, but we had no dedicated place where people were staying. We had the valet put a “Farewell Bag” in every car he parked, so the guests found it sitting in their car when they got in it to leave later that night. The bags were filled with water bottles (with custom Mike and Krissy wedding labels we made ourselves), some snack packets, cookies, and aspirin. And a little handmade thank you note tied to the handle.
Be sure to view the images from their stunning wedding here!
A lovely idea for showing your guests that they complete your lives, and are part of making your special day what it is, via 100 Layer Cake:
Here’s our favorite part of the wedding…Before taking their seats, guests arrived at the “place card table,” except, this wasn’t your usual place card. Oh no, no. Upon first arrival, the table could be mistaken for a field of wild flowers, but looking closer, you’d see tags with each guests’ name tied around Jonathan Adler Bud Vases. That’s not even the best part. Each table sat lonely with a centerpiece consisting of just one small bouquet of flowers - the rest of the centerpiece was to be completed when guests took their bud vase “place cards” to surround the single bouquet in the center!”
Check out the full post here.
Photography by Sean Flanigan, via 100 Layer Cake.
When N. and I got married, it was really important to us that our guests felt like they were taken care of. We didn’t spend much money on flowers or a fancy cake (though our cake was so divine tasting that my brother went back for a half-dozen red velvet cupcakes the next week), but we did spend a fair amount of time thinking about car pools, airport pickups, food, putting family members on the same floor of the hotel, shuttle busses, snacks to serve during the wedding, the contents of our welcome bag, and more.
There’s much inspiration out there for your dress, your bridesmaids’ gifts, your dessert table, and your centerpieces, but what a lot of us need help with is achieving this ideal guest experience – a sentiment which came to us from a recent bride:
“The thing that makes a wedding is when you feel like the bride and groom have thought of everything…that everyone is taken care of. It’s more important than when the food goes out, or if a specific song is played. It’s how I want my guests to feel at our wedding.”
How do you make your guests feel like that? Through a series of posts from real weddings, together, we’ll figure it out.