HOW TO MAKE WONDERFUL WEDDING WELCOME BASKETS
HOW TO MAKE WONDERFUL WEDDING WELCOME BASKETS
Hello there! Sorry I’ve been missing in action lately. After nearly a year of planning, my son’s wedding is now in the rear view mirror, and it was everything and more than we ever dreamed it would be. Just an amazingly magical evening here at our Lake Arrowhead home.
Photo Credit Apt 3 Photography
Now that I’ve had time to regroup and recover I’ll be sharing lots and lots of wonderful wedding posts covering every detail of the perfectly-perfect event. So today I thought I’d start from the beginning and share with you how to make wonderful wedding welcome baskets.
This was a destination wedding for about 90% of the guests, with folks coming from many places across the country, but in particular, east coast and midwest locals such as New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Florida, Illinois & Utah.
Most would be traveling to our rather remote mountain location from long distances, getting here just in time for the Friday night Welcome Dinner we planned as the start of a 3 day wedding weekend. Thus, we assumed most guests would not have time to stock their vacation rental homes with snacks to tide them over, or breakfast items for the first morning in town. So we decided to fill our Wedding Welcome Baskets with my recipes for delicious and nutritious Granola & Banana Bread as breakfast item.
We baked mini loaves of Banana Bread in parchment paper. Then wrapped the parchment around each loaf and sealed them in plastic wrap to keep them fresh.
Next we placed them in cellophane bags and added a personalized wrapper.
The printed wraps were actually repurposed “belly bands” ordered from Minted.com where we got the wedding invitations. There is a whole suite of items that Minted offers as part of the collection called Blue Ridge.
While I can take credit for the recipes, my son’s bride, Ann, did all the baking. The next thing she tackled was my yummy recipe for Granola.
After preparing 3 batches of an already very large recipe, we measured equal portions of Granola and placed it in individual zip lock bags.
Each bag of Granola was then slipped into a cellophane bag & cinched with a twist tie. To decorate the bags we added a small tassel and personalized hot wax seal.
I’m telling you, it takes a village to pull off a wedding, and that was certainly the case for us. Thanks to the help of an army of friends and family, we managed to pull out all the stops and produce a truly magnificent event. One example of help from friends was the invaluable assistance from my friend Dave. He spent several wedding-prep days with me, and produced things like these amazing wax seals. It’s a tedious task but not difficult.
I purchased a custom wax stamp from a great company called Artisaire. I got their largest size stamp which is 1.5″ in diameter. Their wax is actually more like plastic, which is extruded out of a hot glue gun onto a non-stick silicone baking sheet. Using an ice cold stamp, Dave produced dozens of seals. The final step was to add an adhesive backing to each seal which allows them to be placed on anything you wish, and in our case, on the cello bags of Granola.
Next we added homemade Lime & Lavender Shortbread Cookies. Fortunately, Bride, Ann, loves to bake, and boy did she get her fill of it just 2 days before the wedding. When she was in medical school she used to keep her fellow med students well supplied with baked goodies after what she termed “procrastabaking”. In other words, she procrastinated from studying by baking.
She sure proved herself a worthy baker, with wedding guests later raving about the goodies they enjoyed from their Welcome Baskets.
Ann baked enough Lime & Lavender Shortbread Cookies (recipe coming soon) to put 10 cookies in every basket. We wrapped each stack of cookies in plastic wrap, slipped them in a cellophane bag, and tied them up with white & gray baker’s twine.
A tag was added, yet another item available from Minted.com.
For a nutritious snack item we filled plastic containers with mixed nuts (from Costco), then dressed them up with Minted.com Favor Stickers.
Traditionally, wedding welcome baskets often contain items that originate in the city where the wedding is taking place. So we added bottles of Arrowhead Spring Water, a copy of our local Lake Arrowhead Magazine, and a bottle of Razzleberry Hard Cider from our local winery and cider purveyor, Sycamore Ranch Winery & Vineyard.
To house all of these wonderful Wedding Welcome Basket goodies I sourced these cool rustic crates at JoAnn’s
We filled them with Fine Cut Paper Shred in French Vanilla from PaperMart.
All of the basket items were then attractively arranged in the wooden crates. We tied a 1.5″ Wired Gray Satin Ribbon around each crate, tucked in a Sola Flower and tied on a Favor Tag to complete the package.
To recap I’ve prepared a list of all the resources I used to construct our Wedding Welcome Baskets along with handy product links.
Wood Half Crate $6.99 Fine Cut Paper Shred
1.5″ Wired Gray Satin Ribbon Sola Flower
Small Gray Tassel White & Gray Baker’s Twine
So there you have it: HOW TO MAKE WONDERFUL WEDDING WELCOME BASKETS
Thanks so much for dropping in!
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All opinions expressed in this post are my own. Unless otherwise noted, all photos are the original property of Celia Becker @ www.AfterOrangeCounty.com and may not be reproduced without specific permission. This post contains affiliate links. If you click on a link and make a purchase I may receive a small commission which helps to make this blog possible. Thanks for your support.
