Girls Work Party

When I left you all, we had gone home from the bachellorette party... drunk, tired, blistered from our beautiful but torturous high heal shoes, and pretty much ready to go to bed. I know that's how I felt at least. I'm really not sure what happened to everyone else, but apparently they all got back to the hotel or got their blow up matteress out if they were staying with me.

The next morning we slept in. Even though I had the entire weekend scheduled out,

I tried to be as honest and realistic with it as possible. I knew if we shut the bars down on Thursday night, there was no way anyone was going to be making a coffee run at 7am. So, I planned for everyone to meet over at my house around 11. I had some muffin mix and such in the cabinet and figured I'd make it a sort of bridesmaids/girlfriends brunch, but my mom ended up calling on her way from the hotel and brought a dozen Bruggers bagels and cream cheese! She's the best mother-of-the-bride/maid-of-honor ever!

Jessica even took a picture to prove to Jay that they had made me eat. I have a bad tendency to not eat when I get excited/stressed/focused and Jay had charged them all with forcing me to eat if necessary!



After we ate, I got most of the girl's working on the favors. You know I'd have done them ahead of time, but my wonderful friend Darby was making wonderful cookies as the favors and of course you can't do that months in advance. So, in order to make it as easy a possible, I had long ago designed what I wanted them to look like, printed out all the stickers and stuck them to the celophane bags, print and cut out all the photobucket instruction cards, and cut all the ribbon to the desired length and fired the edges so they wouldn't unravel. And when I got the cookies from Darby, she was awesome enough to go ahead and put two in each bag.

So all the girls had to do was fold the bag down, punch two holes (with my awesome but hard as heck) hole puncher, string the ribbon through the photobucket card and then bag, and tie a pretty bow. Here's me explaning how to put them together.

Tip: Do absolutely as much as you can ahead of time, even if you have to wait until the weekend/week of to do something, evaluate and see if there is ANY part of the project that you can do ahead of time. Believe me, every minute saved is a little stress off your shoulders. My wedding motto: It is never too early to do ANYTHING!

All the while, Jess and I were taking the multitude of flowers that had been delivered the day before from the wholesale flower company and arranging them into bouquets.



Tips: 1) Delegate as much as you can, and as much as your friends are willing to take on... BUT... only delegate those things that you feel you can adequetly explain how you want it done. Usually helpers find, "Oh I don't really know. Just do it however" frustrating! So, if you don't know how you want it done, plan to do it yourself! This is why I did the wedding party flowers with only Jess as a helper. 2) If you are arranging your own flowers, always start with the bouquets first! You might think that table arrangements are easier and therefore you should just get them out of the way, but you would be WRONG! You want to use your best blooms for the bouquets so, start with them so you have your pick of the best flowes. You don't want to have to be going back through you table arrangements exchanging prestine blooms for not so prestine blooms later!

We finished my bouquet first.

And then we made the two bridesmaid bouquets and the boutineers.

Everything that weekend, seemed to happen with amazing timing. Just about the time that Jess and I were finishing up with all the wedding party flowers, the girls finished up the favors and were ready for another project. Well, actually, they were probably ready for a drink after dealing with me the whole day, but you know...

So, I set us all up making the different flower arrangments to go on the tables, down the isle, and on the windows.

Tip: Expect that no matter how well you have planned, there will always been a snaffu. One of ours happened when I realized that I somehow didn't have all the larger mason jars I thought I did. (note: missing jar was later found in fridge with bouquets in them.) :-) I had a jar of spaghetti sauce in the pantry that was just like the jars we were using (actually that is were the jars came from in the first place). After unsuccessfully trying to soak off the label in a quick hot bath in the bathroom sink, I decided to reconfigure the arrangments. We decided to use the larger jars on the two buffet tables and smaller jars on the drink table. It ended up working out perfectly since the drink table ended up having more stuff on it than I anticipated. My original idea wouldn't have worked as well as I had planned. So, be flexible!

After all the arrangements were made, we cleaned up, and took some well earned brakes!