Anatomy of a Welcome Bag

Forty-two blue bags, all in a row (excuse the terrible iPhone photo)…

I’m a little bit ahead of myself, but I assembled our welcome bags this week and seeing them in my dining room makes me even more anxious for April get here.

I originally bought paper bags from Target, but my test run made it clear that they weren’t big enough. At first I decided to leave out one of the beverages and just cram everything else in there, but the bags also seemed too plain and I couldn’t find a way of dressing them up that I really liked. Doing a label over the top to seal them wasn’t an option because they were so full, and wide satin ribbon for 42 bags costs a fortune. So I returned them and bought larger, sustainable, reusable bags from Paper Mart — for the same price!

They don’t stand up well on their own, but I had a ton of extra chipboard laying around, so I cut 8.5″x11″ sheets in half and put them in the bottoms for support.

I didn’t want any of the paper goods to get lost in the bottom of the bag, so I bought 9″x12″ clear envelopes in bulk on eBay (less than $9 for 100) and put everything in there.

From left: clear envelopes, eBay ($9); Travel Salem guide, visitors center (free); Oregon state maps, state department (free); Willamette Valley wineries guides, WVWA ($25 for 50); welcome cards, printed at home on leftover Eames Furniture Weave cover stock (free); Oregon postcards, printed for free through VistaPrint (free); Oregon stickers, Heart in Oregon ($20 for 50).

Several months ago, I went to Costco and priced a ton of beverages, snacks and candies to figure out what I wanted to put in the bags. I settled on Sunchips, mini chocolate chip cookies, peppermint patties, bottled water, S. Pellegrino, assorted nuts, dried fruit and ginger cookies. (That’s one of the returned Target bags hanging out in the background.)

I didn’t like the nut assortments that came in individual packages, so I bought spice jars at Ikea and then layered in chocolate-covered raisins, almonds, walnuts and peanuts.

And the ginger cookies came in bulk, so I ordered super cheap little glassine bakery bags on eBay, split the cookies between them and sewed them closed with my sewing machine.

I have to do the same thing for the dried fruit, but I have to do that closer to the wedding.

I absolutely cannot wait to hand these out! But here’s a logistics question for all you brides out there: Did you run into any trouble with the hotels accepting the bags, distributing them to the guests, etc.? I was hoping that I could bring them to the hotel with a list of guests and each party’s arrival date, but any guidance would be appreciated.