Out of Town Bags

While planning our wedding, we took our guests' comfort very seriously. When we originally started planning, we talked about what were the most and least important things to us and the important ones always revolved around our guests feeling welcome, taken care of and happy. One of the things that we did to accomplish that was to put out of town (OOT) bags at the hotels that our guests were staying at for the to receive at check-in. I've never personally received anything like that for going to an out-of-town wedding, but I think it's the details that count and certainly wanted to do this for our guests. We talked and thought about these throughout the whole planning period but they ended up being one of the very last things we made a final decision on and actually didn't do them until the morning of the rehearsal!

We ordered muslin bags online and used some ink and stencils to put our own design on the outside. Then we made little tags with a stamp and wrote "Welcome to Minnesota! love, Nick & Meredith" on them.

Here's what we put in ours...

• A postcard in regard to Minnesota, Minneapolis, the Twin Cities, etc. (I found these at Walgreens for super cheap!)
• Individual bag of goldfish crackers (pre-packaged)
• Individual bag of swedish fish (we got little candy bags and ties from Michaels). Swedish fish were kind of a nod to the land of Norweigen heritage that is Minnesota but also satisfied the need for something candy. :)
• Ole and Lena fortune cookies. I was so excited when I found these! Ole and Lena is a MN thing - they are two Norweigans that say funny things. I thought they were a super cute idea.
• A word find. We just made this online and it was comprised of wedding words.
• A wedding weekend information booklet. We made these in Microsoft Word - little 4x4 pages that included a timeline, hotel shuttle info, local attractions, contact numbers, etc.
• 2 water bottles - we bought water resistant labels online and printed our own design onto them and put them on each. We also used a bunch of these for the wedding party, etc.

We took these to the front desk of the hotels our guests were staying at and had them give them to each person who checked in on our list. Unfortunately, I didn't hear many comments about them but I know the desk handed them out and hopefully our guests enjoyed the welcome!