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.

A few weeks ago, I went to Costco and priced out items for the OOT welcome bags. Yes, I walked around Costco with a notebook and pen and did research. It felt very official.

I’m way ahead of when I can actually start assembling the bags, but I wanted to get the shopping out of the way because a) I have enough things to keep on the mental to-do list, and b) Costco’s inventory changes constantly and my research would be moot if I didn’t get down to business.

All of the food is dated late 2009 (or later), so I went for it. And when I got home, I immediately did a test run — minus a few things that I’ll have to repackage into individual servings at a later date: dried fruit, peppermint patties and gingerthins.

The bags are from Target (and a lucky find, since the typeface almost matches the one we’re using for everything else). The Salem Visitors’ Center gave me a box of visitor guides (for free!), and they’re like little magazines. That was a nice surprise. In front of the travel guide is a Willamette Valley winery guide, and peeking out in front of the S. Pellegrino (my big splurge) is a Heart in Oregon sticker. On the right is an Ikea jar with a nut assortment (another treat I’ll be repackaging… later). And the rest is standard fare — little chocolate chip cookies, Sunchips, bottled water.

But as soon as I unfolded the little bag, I knew there was a problem. There was no way all that stuff was going to fit.

I’m not sure what I was thinking. When I bought the bags, I can very distinctly remember thinking, how in the world am I going to fill these? Clearly, I found a way. Somehow.

The voice of reason says to keep the bottled water and ditch the Pellegrino. So what if it was on sale? And, ahem, so what if you love Pellegrino? The Kirkland bottled water is 25 cents a bottle. Seriously.

But the voice of aesthetics says, excuse me, that Pellegrino is in a beautiful glass bottle. And — bonus — you wouldn’t have to go through the painstaking process of removing all those Kirkland labels and replacing them with your own. Checking an item off the DIY checklist (with exactly zero effort) sounds pretty good right now, no?