I’m mainly writing this so that I don’t forget these ideas. Two years is a long enough time to forget simple, rather insignificant details, and I don’t want to forget!

As I was browsing through the magazines and catalogs accumulated from friends, family, and Borders, I quickly began to realize that one major cost of a wedding could very well be favors for guests. My friend Amy is starting her own Green Living and Consulting business and I am creating her website for her. She has some oils and different, creative recipes for all sorts of things, so I turned to her for some ideas of inexpensive, unique favors. Boy, did she deliver!

There are endless options for what we could do, but the two that sound the best to me are having essential oils (lavendar, Shane’s favorite scent; and maybe some vanilla, one of my favorite scents) in bottles with a lid and dropper, and some sort of herb mix (like Chocolate Mint!) in tulle sachets or some other cheap container. Both would come with a label with a link to recipes and different uses for each thing. For example, the Chocolate Mint could be used for tea, cooking, or could be hung in the bathroom while showering and would make the whole room smell good. We could also grow our own herbs, and everyone could know it was “grown with love”. Lol.

Amy also mentioned that we could use the oils in centerpieces so that the entire room would smell good during the reception. She gave me the link to her wholesale supplier’s website, and that spurred some more ideas. A while ago I had the idea of putting reed diffusers in silk flower arrangements so that the flowers wouldn’t die but would still smell up the room. Well, I’m thinking of doing that for the centerpieces and just having a little bit of oil in the bottom. Then I think I would be able to have them ready at least a week (probably more) before the wedding and cut down on the things I have to do right before it. Or, I could put them together months before the wedding and just put the oil in a few days before hand.

Plenty of options, plenty of time. I’m just glad that I’ve found a rather economical and unique solution to yet another thing! Our month is going to be rather busy. We’re heading to Bloomington Saturday to check out the venues at the IMU. With the help of my mom, we got Xavier’s room painted and will be putting the final touches on this week hopefully, then moving in the furniture and getting the garage somewhat clean. Then we have our engagement pictures on the 18th, my family reunion the 25th, and Shane has fishing tournaments both of those nights. I’ve been moving along on the projects I have for some clients while trying to find a full time position to help pay for all of this wedding stuff. I think its definitely for the best that we’ve decided to push back the engagement party to October. We’ll need a weekend off after all of this.