We held our ceremony and reception/dinner at Grand Superior Lodge in Two Harbors, MN on Lake Superior. I highly recommend it for a family or romantic getaway. The views are spectacular and if you get a lakeside room, you can enjoy the view for even more of your stay! We had gotten engaged during a stay there a year before our wedding, and ultimately decided to have our wedding there for a few reasons. We love Lake Superior and wanted to give our families and friends a good excuse to visit the beautiful North Shore and the resort offered amazing specials for weddings held there in their off season. That might be an obvious tip, but I want to point it out anyway...check non-peak seasons and days for your wedding. It literally saved us, at a minimum, $5,000!!
When I began planning and my vision for the wedding, two things I really wanted to offer that evening were s'mores for our guests (the resort hosts a nightly fire pit out on the patio so it was perfect) and sparklers for a send-off at the end of the night. I started looking at the cost of tags, packaging, etc on wedding sites, Etsy, and in craft stores. It became clear pretty quickly that nice tags in colors I wanted could easily cost me over $100 for the s'mores and sparklers. No way I was spending that.
So, how did I get around it? It all started with an email for free address labels from Shutterfly. I found a design I liked and changed the usual name and address lines to the text I wanted. I got a couple of my friends and family to order the free labels too so I had enough for both projects. After S&H they were actually a little over $3 for each 24 labels and we ordered a total of 3 sets (72 labels) for each project. so $18 for a total of 144 labels!
Next, I had to figure out how to convert that into tags, and cheaply. One day I spotted packs of 16 scrolled edge cardboard tags with twine. There were two sizes in each pack (8 of each), so I bought enough packs that I would have 72 of each size (9 packs.) These were only $1 a package in the dollar bins in the front of the store alongside the checkouts. I wanted them to be more elegant than the cardboard color allowed for, so I took them home an spray painted one side of them with the Rust-Oleum Bright Coat Gold Metallic Finish paint I used for many of my wedding decorations. They looked gorgeous! The way the paint covered the fibers in the cardboard made it look like gold leaf!
When I tried putting one of the address labels on the smaller tags I found out it was too big and it looked tacky (like it was indeed an address label stuck to a tag), so I used a pair of scissors with scalloped edges to cut out each label and then stuck them to the tags. My scissors were Fiskars I bought online from Amazon for about $4. The cutting out process was a bit tedious at times, but the end result was lovely!
The final touches on the tags were replacing the plain twine that came in the package with eggplant colored twine from Michael's. On the sparkler tags I also needed to use a hole punch to make a second hole so I could thread the sparklers through the tags (see above image.)
To finish the sparkler display, I found a galvanized bucket with handles at a thrift store and spray painted it with the Rust-Oleum Bright Coat Gold Metallic Finish paint I mentioned above. I painted a card board cut-out I got at Michael's with chalkboard paint, wrote on it with a chalk marker, and attached it to the bucket with gold cord tied around the handles. I then used eggplant ribbon (I bought a huge roll of at a thrift store for 99 cents) to make bows for each handle. I put a piece of foam I had laying around in the bottom so I could create and arrangement that stayed put by sticking the sparklers in to it. The sparklers we decided on were these 20 inch gold sparklers from Superior Celebrations. They were fabulous!
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| Photo by: Erin Sather From the Woods Photography |
I waited until about a week before the wedding to put my s'more packets together so they would be fresh. I purchased a large thin storage container to seal and haul them in to help keep them fresh and protected too. I found treat bags at Michaels. The package I found had 100 bags for only a few dollars. I put a paper towel folded into a little square in each one, two squares of graham crackers, a strip of a Hershey's chocolate bar, and a couple of marshmallows. I tied a bow with the smaller size tags I had made around the top of the treat bags and made an arrangement of them on a cupcake stand and gold chargers at the reception.
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| Photo by: Erin Sather From the Woods Photography |
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My final tips are regarding logistics of the sparklers. Both for safety and to make sure we had enough sparklers for everyone during the send-off at the end of the night, we put a sign asking guests not to take them until the DJ announced it was time at the end of the night. We also had the best man ask the guests not to take them before the DJ's announcement in his speech. We also had the DJ remind everyone it was coming up about 15 minutes prior so they could grab their jackets and such if they were not in the ballroom. My uncle lead the send-off giving a few safety and disposal instructions (LIKE REMOVING THE TAGS FIRST!! VERY FLAMABLE!!) and guided everyone in singing "This Little Light of Mine" to us. It was such a sweet ending to an incredible day!
