Writing Thank You Cards

Something I have come to appreciate during this wedding adventure is a nice thank you card. I believe that when you get a gift you should always hand write thank you cards to the person who gave you the gift. This is common courtesy and I think that even with the sometimes hundreds of gifts you might get during a wedding you should still write everyone a thank you card.

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So today I'm going to share with you a few tips that I learned while writing our thank you cards for all the gifts we received. Some of these can be used for writing any thank you card and some of these are just things I think make it more personal.

1. Try to have all of your thank you cards mailed two weeks after the event. We wrote all of our thank you cards the day after each of our wedding showers. This made it easy to remember what everyone got us and to make the cards more personal.

2. Always mention the gift you received. If it was money we said, "thank you so much for the card and gift" this lets them know that you did receive what they gave you. It also lets people know you looked at all of your gifts.

3. Try to mention how you will use your gift. With cookware I said, "I couldn't wait to use it in our kitchen." I also said about money, "that it will help with all the expenses of moving/the wedding/the honeymoon."

4. Make sure you spell everyone's names correctly, there is nothing worse then getting  a thank you card and having your name spelled wrong.

5. Buy a box of thank you cards at Hobby Lobby or Michael's. This saved me a TON of time, I got 2 boxes of 50 blank cards and the extra's I can use for other things later.

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6. If you get a gift from a family, this happened a lot with us. We sent one thank you card to the matriarch of the family. So the parents got the card and we addressed it to the Smith Family. This may not be the  most correct way to do things but it was the simplest especially when we didn't have addresses for everyone.

7. Make sure you express your gratitude but try not to be repetitive. I know this is really hard but I tried to mix up what I said in the cards.

Example: Thank you so much for the crockpot. We really appreciate the gift and look forward to using it in our kitchen making meals together. Thank you so much for the support.


How do you write thank you cards? Do you have a special trick?

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Coastal Charm 

Wedding Wednesday- How About That Party

When you are attending a traditional wedding you expect to go to the ceremony, maybe a cocktail hour, and then a reception. This reception generally serves a meal and has cake and drinks for all to enjoy. Well at these receptions people tend to get very lavish on their table decorations. The party is much more about how things look and what the theme of the party is, this is where things can get out of hand. So today I'm going to share with you some gorgeous and slightly elaborate reception tables.

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I really love the red in this reception, I know that it must have been very well planned but I think that it was very well done. I also like how they have the clear vases and the candles with different height center pieces that give you lots of depth and interest in the table. 

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These reception tables scream garden party to me. This look is very classic and elegant, I like the small centerpiece of roses and how every chair has a back cover. This is a very traditional wedding set up which is always beautiful and sophisticated.

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Let me be honest, the lights are what captured my attention and I would have loved to see this in real life. I have no doubt this looked like a fairy tail. I also like how the flower center pieces are long and narrow but also short, this gives plenty of space to mingle with your table mates and to see everyone. 

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Once again I love the lights in this reception, it looks like a woodland dream you would find in Neverland. I really like the simplicity of the table piece. The wood with the tin cans and flowers on them are perfect with the lights and other gorgeous decorations. Anything more would have been too much, this turned out quite lovely. 

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I really love the actual tables at this reception. I also like the combination of candles, greenery, flowers, and vases. They work well together and compliment the gorgeous table tops extremely well. This is perfect for country club or vineyard wedding. I think this was very well done and unexpected for a wedding reception.

If you are just joining Wedding Wednesday catch up on every week here. 

Which one is your favorite? What kind of center pieces do you like for weddings?

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Coastal Charm

Making Your Own Wedding Bouquets

As I've talked about on Wedding Wednesday's  it is easy to let your budget get out of control when you are planning your wedding. So in order to save some major money on the wedding I decided to make all of the bouquets and boutonniere's for the wedding. This has saved us a HUGE chunk of change to spend in other areas of the wedding now. So I'm going to share with you my easy way to make your own wedding bouquets.  

The first thing I did was go to a wonderful place called Basket Market in Oklahoma City. Now what is this wonderful place you ask, well it's like a wholesale hobby lobby. That's right, its wholesale hobby lobby, they sell hobby lobby things in bulk. So it is PERFECT for making a ton of different things for your wedding. I also watched their monthly deals to find out when the bulk box flowers were on sale and that's when I bought our flowers. 

The box flowers look like the above flowers. They are each single stem flowers that come in boxes of 6-12 stems. They have almost every kind of flower in every color, so it made things very simple when I was trying to decide on what kind and type of flowers I wanted. And in case you were wondering yes I was that extremely annoying person who would pull out a few stems of each box and bunch them together to try and find the right flowers for my bouquets. 

Each flower stem had 3 or 4 leaves attached so I made sure to strip the stems bare. This made it a thousand times easier when I was bunching them together. I also trimmed the stems all as close to the same length before I started bunching them together. If you have wire cutters that will make this process a lot easier. I tried to make sure my bouquet base was long enough to comfortably hold with both of my hands, this will be up to the preference of the bouquet holder. 

After I have done this will all of my flowers for the bouquet I then spent approximately 20-60 minutes trying to decide exactly how I wanted the bouquet arranged. I just did this with my hands, there are a million tips to use rubber bands, or floral tape, I used my hands. If you try those other options like I did originally you end up getting annoyed because it doesn't stay how you want it just right. 

Now the best part about these stems is that they have metal wires in them you can bend to make your bouquet lay right. This helps with the flowers position and gives you the ability to have your OCD make the flowers perfect.  

My next step was putting all of the stems together. Why yes, I did use duck tape. This was possibly the best idea I had come up with so far. I have zero fear that my flowers will fall apart or get damaged with my duck tape method. I know they will be secure and exactly how I want with the duck tape around the stems. 

I did add so leaves from the stems around the bottom of my bouquet just to add some more depth and interest. I did the duck tape around all of the bare stems first and then I did small pieces of tape on each leaf piece. This gave me the ability to pull them off and rearrange them until they were how I wanted. Then I did a couple (5 times) of duck tape around the top to make sure they were all secure. 

After the duck tape I wanted to cover my stems. So I got some ribbon that I had picked out and used Glue Dots to attach them to the base of the bouquet. I put several (as many as possible) glue dots on the actual base of the bouquet as well as several on the ribbon and made sure to overlap the ribbon a little over each strand. This ensured that no duck tape was seen and it made almost every single row of ribbon attached with glue dots. I used several dots at the top and double looped around the top and did the same at the bottom of the bouquet. 

As you can see at the bottom of the bouquet the ribbon is just attached with invisible glue dots. I also made sure to burn the end of my ribbon so that it wouldn't fray. I covered all the way to the very edge of the stems because they were hideous after being trimmed. 

And this is the final product of my wedding bouquet. I really love peonies and blue and yellow are our colors. The bridesmaids will be wearing blue dresses so I wanted to incorporate the blue and yellow somehow in my bouquet. I really like the way the peonies and garden roses look together and it seemed like the perfect bouquet to carry down the isle. 

I followed the exact same steps for the bridesmaid bouquets. They were actually a lot easier because they were so much smaller. This made it much easier to keep a good hold on the flowers. 

My wonderful flower storage system until the wedding, I found a box and poked holes big enough for the base of the flowers to fit through. This will keep the flowers from being smashed and loosing their shape before the big day. It also makes things really easy when you are transporting things. 

There is my simply tutorial on how to make your own wedding flowers. What do you think of my bouquet strategy? Did you make your own bouquet or have a florist make one for you? 

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Coastal Charm 
Home Stories A to Z

DIY Wedding Invitations

Today I'm going to share with you a little trick that I learned while wedding planning. If you can make it yourself it will save you TONS of money in the end. So for our wedding I definitely took advantage of this. When I was looking at wedding invitations I found plenty that I really liked, they were all going to cost between $2-3 a piece, per invitation! Now, I quite frankly think that is insane. Yes is is our wedding but we don't need to spend an arm and a leg or take out a loan to pay for everything.

So I did what any girl would do, I designed my own and ordered them online. That's right, I used a wonderful website called PicMonkey and I created our invitations with a lot of trial and error. So I'm going to give you the scoop on what I did and how to avoid a lot of pain and suffering while making your own wedding invitations. Everything in this post is my own thoughts and ideas, I am not getting paid to promote these sites I just really like them and think they are very user friendly. Now on to the tutorial.

When you get to PicMonkey this is the home page. I'm going to walk you through step by step what I did for our invitation. It might not be the best way but it worked well for me. So first I decided to do collage and put in one picture and then text next to the picture. 

So after I picked the collage option it opened up a blank canvas and I went to the left side of the screen and clicked on the above icon and opened up ducks in a row and then picked the very first option with two boxes. 

This is what it looked like after I had selected ducks in a row the first option. I had two blank white boxes side by side. 

Next I put in my background color so that it wouldn't cover anything up. I decided to go with a dark gray color but as you can see in the picture above you can choose any color that you want on their rainbow chart. 

After this I put in my one picture in the left side of my invitation. Then I went to the very bottom of the screen and adjusted the size of the collage. I wanted our invitations to be 5X7 so I did what anyone would do who needed to know the pixel size. I googled it. So first, click on that lock to the right. It will unlock the percentage part of the sizing, then you need to put in your pixel size which for a 5x7 is 2100x 1500. This should adjust the size of the collage. 

Next I wanted to add in some text on the blank right side, so I went to the top of the page and clicked on edit. After you do this a warning will pop up letting you know that you are leaving this part of thew website, that is okay! Click okay and keep going! 

On the new page you will have a variety of options on the left hand side of the website. To insert text you need to click on the text box. As you see above there are several text options that are available for you to use and if you really love the premium fonts you can sign up for a free trial and get them to make your invitations. 

Once you select a text you will get a text box that appears on the middle of the screen. You can move this box, change the color, and even change the font once you have written something in it. This gives you the option to truly customize your invitation. 

There are also several boarders and graphics that you can use to make your invitation special and customized just for you. This is something that you can play around with to really make the design that you want. The best part about PicMonkey is that you can save this in a PDF and you have all the rights, so you can print it where ever you want and for whatever price you want to pay. 

My next step was finding a place that would print our invitations with high quality for an affordable price. After looking around at several different places I decided to go with VistaPrint. I liked them because you could choose the amount of invitations you wanted without having to pick 25, 50, or 100. Which was really nice because we didn't need 100 but we needed more than 50. So this was the best option for us, plus they provide envelops with the invitations that you print for FREE.

When you get to the Vistaprint homepage you have to make sure and create an invitation to get the bonus free envelops. Above you will see the exact sets I took. 

After you choose wedding invitations this will pop up on your screen and you will choose to use your own design. 

Next this window will appear below the use your complete design option. I selected the 5x7 flat invitation but you can pick whatever works best with your design. 

Then you will go to a page where you upload your design. On this page just upload the front page design and then hit next. 

On the next page you can crop and alter your invitations. Now as you see above, it gives room for the print line. So I would suggest keeping this in mind when you create your invitation or you will be extremely frustrated when you have to edit your design a million times. Then you will have the option to insert a design for the back of the invitation which I thought was fun. 

I created this to be the back of our invitations, but you could put anything back there. After this you will have several options, what kind of paper, how many you want. What kind of envelops and color, as well as if you want return address labels, mugs, blankets, magnets, and a variety of other things. 

It took us about a week to get our invitations in the mail and we are very happy with them. They are great quality and they cost about half the price of the other invitations that I found online. We also created some insert cards on PicMonkey that we are printing on cardstock and including with the invitations. They were super easy and also saved us a ton of money by doing them ourselves. 

What do you think about making your own invitation? Do you have any questions about how to do this more in-depth?

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Coastal Charm 
Craftaholics Anonymous
The Foley Fam

Wedding Wednesday- Favors vs No Favors

If you are just now joining us make sure to check out all of the other Wedding Wednesdays; Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, and Week 4. So far I have talked about a lot of the big decisions you have to make when you are planning your big day. Today I am going to talk about something that a lot of couples are deciding to skip all together.

When you decide what kind of wedding you want to have the biggest thing to keep in mind is the budget. So while some might skimp on food to splurge on the photographer others will cut out traditional things to have new things they would like to have.

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So the ever present question in wedding planning. Do I have to do this or can I just skip it? One of the things I have found that couples skip out on the most is wedding favors. I can understand the desire to skip this step of wedding planning, there always seem to be a lot of favors left over.

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But like the true Southern girl I like to call myself I just can't seem to skip out on this traditional part of weddings. Some people will travel a very far way for your wedding and I think it is polite to give them a small gift for making the effort to celebrate with you.

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While some couples will spend $50 per guest in food and drinks, I think that favors are something you can make for your guest at a low cost while still gifting them something creative and fun.

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I also do not think that your favor has to necessarily go along with your wedding. It can simply be something that is very uniquely you and your groom. Our favors are something that I thought was fun and unique to us. It is also a slight deviation from an idea I saw on Pinterest and I think it is just enough to let our guest know that we appreciate them making the effort to come be apart of our big day.


Do you think wedding favors are a time of the past or a necessary item?

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