Starlitk's Planning Thread

[starlitk]

Starlitk’s Dreams Tulum Wedding Planning thread

I found such an incredible amount of useful information in other brides’ planning threads that I just had to post my own. Thank you so much to all of you brides who blazed the trail with terrific ideas and a generous willingness to share them!

 

ATTIRE

My dress was an Allure, and the groom’s suit was from the Banana Republic Outlet – tailored to fit him perfectly. His tie was a Calvin Klein from Nordstrom Rack. My shoes were Coloriffics from zappos.com, which I had dyed to match his tie. I LOVED my shoes, but they were pretty much ruined from the rain water around the resort before the wedding even began. (Dyed shoes can’t get wet).

 

 

 

 

OOT BAGS

We had 42 guests and assembled an OOT bag for each room (approx 24 bags). All of our ideas came from the BDW forum. Thank you! Here’s what we included:

 

A. 2 tote bags – one designed for women and one designed for men. The men’s bags had the seal of Mexico and said our date in Spanish. The women’s bags had a lyric from our song on it.

One was the bag holding everything in it. The other was wrapped with a ribbon reading “To have and to hold… your stuff on the beach.” I designed everything in Publisher, and then used iron-on transfers. Using these transfers for 44 bags was a nightmare. If I could do it again, I would spend the extra $100 and just have them screen printed. I broke our glass table and burned myself doing these things! We sought to design these so that people would want to reuse them in the future, and figured that something with just our names or wedding logo might be less likely to be reused. In the end, the transferred images didn’t withstand water very well, so I’m not sure that they’ll be reused at all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

B. First aid kit in a baggie, tied with ribbon reading, “in sickness and in health” consisting of:

-2 hand sanitizers (approx. 20 cents each from Costco)

-A sleeve of 6 pepto bismol tablets

-A 24 pk of Walmart Ibuprofen (94c each)

-Roll of Alka seltzer tablets

-4 bandaids

-2 alcohol wipes

-2 Off! Bug repellant wipes

 

 

C. Fun stuff tied with ribbon and a note that said, “in good times and in bad”. It included:

- A deck of cards (we got 2packs in the dollar spot section of Target)

- 2 water guns (we got 4 for $1 at Dollar Tree)

- A booklet of Spanish phrases – a template that we altered to include some stuff including, “Lo siento, soy gringo” and other things.

- A stapled booklet of crosswords and games we made and others we copied from game books. We figured this would come in handy on a rainy day. The ones we liked were a bride and groom trivia crossword (for which we gave a prize to the first one to finish). It was sufficiently hard enough that you had to talk to other guests (from different aspects of our lives) in order to solve it. We hoped it encouraged mingling among our guests. We also made a word search with all of our guests’ names.

 

 

D. Our welcome letter with an agenda of the weekend’s events, and a map of the resort where we wrote in the locations of our events. We attached the letters with a ribbon to the bag’s handles with a note that said, “to love and to cherish… our friends and family.”

 

[starlitk]

CEREMONY

We used chair ribbons from efavormart www.efavormart.com - Satin Sashes after seeing them look so great in DeniseL’s photos! We also gave sandalwood fans from this website, I think: Sandalwood Fans - Buy Now! to give away during our ceremony. We also made our own programs using MS Publisher.

 

We walked into I’m Yours by Jason Mraz, and walked out to Barry White’s You’re My First, My Last, My Everything.

 

 

 

 

COCKTAIL HOUR SET-UP

 

 

[starlitk]

RECEPTION SET-UP

We had our reception by the relax/adult pool.

 

 

 

 

We got our paper lanterns from Paper Lantern Store Round Paper Lanterns.

 

3 - 16" White Even Ribbing Round Paper Lantern

8 - 12EVP-WH 12" White Even Ribbing Round Paper Lantern

6 - 12" Light Lime Even Ribbing Round Paper Lantern

6 - 16" Light Lime Even Ribbing Round Paper Lantern

We also had 6 turquoise 16” lanterns from Hobby Lobby because Paper Lantern Store was out of that color.

 

We lit these by using info on throwies (without magnets, though) that we found on this forum and in other places. This ended up costing us about 30 cents per lantern, which was awesome. Here are the sites we used to figure it out:

http://bestdestinationwedding.com/forum/t37079

throwies, led, weddingbee - Google Search

If Only I Had Majored In Event Lighting Instead of Biology Weddingbee The Wedding Blog

We ordered the diffuse LEDs and batteries from ebay, and got the binder clips to hold them together from Office Max.

 

We also made our own table numbers. We got the info from this site: Candle Table Numbers | Your DIY Wedding. For some reason, I was able to open the pdfs as images in publisher, change the color to black, and then shrink them to fit my vases. We laser printed the images on velum and then used fishing wire to wrap the vellum around the candle because I didn’t like the way the tape looked (you could see it when it was lit up. Then, we dropped an LED throwie with two bulbs inside the vase. We also lined the inside of the vase with two sheets of tracing paper to diffuse the LED.

 

 

Our centerpieces were mostly plants and a few lilies.

 

 

 

We made our own menus and namecards using Publisher. Anabel put the namecards in sand on the table so that the wind wouldn’t blow them away.

 

 

 

As a guestbook, we used a clear plastic jar that I got from Walmart, cut up different colored pieces of cardstock, and laid out sharpies. We framed a message reading, “write down a wish or piece of advice for the newlyweds and drop it in the jar.” This turned out great! People wrote sweet and funny stuff that we enjoyed reading and will later put in a scrapbook.

 

For music, we just used our own ipod. Our first dance was to Barry Louis Polisar’s All I Want is You, and the groom danced with his mother to the Over the Rainbow song from 50 First Dates.

 

I think that’s it!

[Carlitarenee]

It looks great. I love the sayings for your OOT bags and your colors! Congratulations

[Sita&Nate]

I love the green that is on your DH's tie and your shoes Looking forward to reading a review as well!

[marise]

Everything looked great! THanks for sharing!

[sunstarsmoon]

everything looks great

[Blkatz]

wow-everything turned out so great! Congrats!

[*Heather*]

Wow, great job! I love your OOT bags and the contents - very creative and I'm sure your guests will use them again!

 

Congrats!

[*Heather*]

Wow, great job! I love your OOT bags and the contents - very creative and I'm sure your guests will use them again!

 

Congrats!