Wedding Party Guide

Given that you spend an adequate amount of time shopping for your wedding tiara, it is imperative that you find a good place to store it after the wedding day. Given that your wedding tiara is not a large item, the task of finding a storage spot should be relatively easy. However, if you put it off, you will find that your tiara pops up in places you don’t expect because it’s not stored away.

For example, if your wedding tiara is not in a safe place, it might show up in the dresser drawer, the laundry basket, the china cabinet, or even the trunk of your car. These seem like totally unrealistic places to find your wedding tiara but worse things have happened.

Most of us are aware that you can have your wedding dress preserved at your local dry cleaner. After the wedding dress is cleaned, steamed, and/or pressed, it is folded and placed in an acid-free archival chest with or without a display window. If you ask nicely, the dry cleaner will put your tiara in the package as well. Depending on the cleaner, the waiting time for the preservation will take between one and four months.

Some people would argue that the wedding tiara does not belong in the wedding dress preservation box because it cannot be touched or displayed. I would agree with that argument. However, unlike your wedding jewelry that you will wear time and time again, the odds of you wearing your tiara after your wedding day is few and far between. And even if you decide not to put your tiara with your wedding dress in the preservation box, there are plenty of places to put the tiara. For starters, you can start with a shoe box. Simply find an empty shoebox and fill it with bubble wrap and label it. There you go. Done deal.

For those of us who are married, we can relate to the dilemma of choosing the gifts for the wedding party. On the bride side, you often have a choice between the same gift for all the girls, or individual gifts for each person. On the groom side, it is usually one masculine gift for everyone in the party. And in some instances, the bride and groom will provide the same gift to both the bridesmaids and the grooms. For example, when my very good friend got married a few years back, him and his wife gave the whole bridal party each a bottle of wine with their names on it and the date of the wedding.

Speaking to the bride, have you ever thought of giving costume jewelry bracelets to your bridesmaids. The reason this can be a great idea is that you can customize the bracelets for relatively cheap but at the same time provide a wonderful keepsake. You could buy the materials for the costume jewelry bracelets at a dollar store or you could go to a craft show or galleria to pick out the pieces. Given that you are likely on a time crunch with the whole scope of the wedding planning, I would suggest placing a custom order at either a local craft store or an online store.

Given that designing costume jewelry bracelets is not a new concept, the process of ordering each bracelet for your bridesmaids should be relatively simple. Depending on how many bridesmaids are in your party will likely determine how much you will spend. If you have only three or four then you can afford to get fancy with several different types of settings. However, if you have 8 or more bridesmaids then you may want to simplify the customization, but not too much that you detract from the design. Remember, like most of the things you do to prepare for the wedding, you want the final product to produce long lasting memories.