DIY Bridesmaid Boxes

My wedding might be nearly a full year away, but I have been diving headfirst into planning and projects. I especially wanted to ask my bridesmaids early, since several of them live out of town and all of them have busy schedules. Rather than just make a phone call, the sorority girl in me felt the need to do something crafty.

Supplies:
Wooden boxes from your local craft store
Acrylic paints in the colors of your choice, small paintbrushes
Printer access
Pencil
Confetti
Examples of your colors (I got mine from the paint section at Lowe's)
Ribbon
Scrapbooking supplies (paper, stickers)
Any small items you'd like to include (I chose tiny bottles of limoncello and Tazo "Zen" tea)

For each box, I used an antique-y white and pale pink, which are part of our wedding color scheme. After painting the boxes inside and out, I decided my handwriting was just too terrible to freehand the lettering. The following is my favorite technique to use when painting just about anything! I printed out "Be My Maid?" and "Maid of Honor?" from my computer ("bridesmaid" wouldn't fit on the boxes) and roughly cut around the wording area. Next, I colored the back of the letters with plain old No. 2 pencil:   

 

I placed the printed wording in the desired position, then began tracing over the outline of the letters with the pencil:

 

 

This is the result you get when you remove the paper - pretty simple, right?

 

 

Now that I had an outline and my horrible handwriting couldn't ruin the wording, I painted the lettering with metallic paint from Martha Stewart Crafts.

 

Next, I cut paint cards from Lowe's into little circles. I hole-punched each of the shades and threaded some wedding-themed ribbon through to hold them together. I threw in some confetti, and a small bottle of limoncello. Jeff and I traveled around Italy right after he proposed, so it was a very personal touch.

 

I also printed out information for each of the girls on scrapbooking paper. I used the business card template on Microsoft Publisher to create little cards for "Our Day," "Your Role," "My Girls," and "Your Dresses." Obviously the date and location of the wedding are important, but I also wanted them understand that I wasn't interested in asking my bridesmaids to pay tons of money for a dress or slave over little wedding tasks. The "My Girls" section just gave a short introduction for each bridesmaid, since they don't all know each other. Instead of filling the boxes with a bunch of dress images, I just provided the information for my Pinterest board that we can all pin to. That way, we can easily share ideas and opinions on the dresses.

 

I put all that information in a little booklet fashioned from textured cardstock and embellished the front with a scrapbooking decal.

 

 

For the final step, I used the same pencil transfer technique mentioned previously to put their initial on the top of each box.

I completed five boxes total, in a relatively short amount of time. Since I had many of the supplies already on hand, this project wasn't expensive either. I'm sending them out this week!

Cheers,

Rachel