Weddings are a big business these days. Pinterest has gone mad for it and so has TV. The joy of the Internet. This just means there’s all the more pressure to get every detail right. And doing that without bankrupting your parents can be pretty difficult. 

Mr Brooker and I are just having a small wedding with about 60 guests, and with bridesmaids’ dresses costing over £200 each, I can only really afford to have 2. As I was part of a close group of 4 at school, this makes things a little diplomatically tricky, but one of us has been a bridesmaid to another of us who has 2 sisters, so hopefully all will be alright on the night and the third friend will be understanding. 

At the end of the day, as I keep reminding myself, it’s our wedding, not theirs. However there are some things I’m planning to do to make sure said friend still feels included, i.e. making sure there’s accommodation with the rest of us the night before, letting her get ready with the main party and maybe asking her to do a reading at the ceremony. If anyone else has been in a similar predicament, I’d love to hear how you dealt with it and how that went down.   

Anyway, in order to get yourself any bridesmaids, you have to ask them. Both of the girls are pretty busy, with one living about 2 and a half hours away where she works as a vet and is therefore hard- working and often on call. The other has an extremely busy social life and has only just been married herself. So it was important that when I finally had the opportunity to ask them to do me the honour that I was able to ask them in an interesting way. And this is what I came up with. The idea of a box of gifts isn’t a new one – they’re all over Pinterest -but I thought it might still be interesting to show you my interpretation. 

  
Firstly, I bought a couple of plain wooden boxes from The Works, which is a great place to pick up cheap craft supplies. Hobbycraft is a good place to pick up this sort of thing as well, although you could of course just Google for whatever you need. I also bought a bottle of almond coloured acrylic paint and gave the outside of each box a few coats of paint. It took a few evenings to get to the finished box, as I wanted to make sure the bottom was painted and dry as well as the top and remaining sides each time I added another coat. 

  
Next, I took some double-sided tape and used it to stick a piece of burlap, cut to size, to fit inside the lid of the box. This isn’t necessary, of course, it just helps to make a £3 wooden box look like something much more expensive. You could of course use card or another type of fabric, possibly in your wedding colours, but I thought the burlap gave it a more natural feel (I can’t stand the word ‘rustic’!) which goes with the theme of my wedding. Glue would make this more secure, but it would have sidled through the burlap so the sticky tape was a more invisible alternative.

As you can see, it makes the box look much more seamless with relatively little effort. Next, I printed out the big question onto some ordinary printer paper, choosing a font which I felt suited the mood of the finished piece. As I said before, I have only 2 bridesmaids. As one of them is married, she’ll be Matron of Honour, but the other will be my Maid of Honour, as she is the Chief Bridesmaid. To avoid the confusion of this confusing situation, I asked the Matron of Honour to be my Bridesmaid and the Maid to be my Maid of Honour.

So I printed out each question, cut a rectangle around at a good proportion, and stick each onto a rectangle of pearlescent card to create a border. Again, not entirely necessary, but the devil is in the detail. 

Again, I sided double-sided tape to attach the card to the burlap inside the box lid, pressing down hard and leaving it open until it was nicely set. By the way, I also bought the burlap and card from The Works. 

To fill the box, I bought some purple tissue paper from Paperchase to match one of the wedding colours we’ve chosen. I used this to line exchange box, then filed them up with girly treats, including some retro sweets, nail files, homemade shortbread in the shape of dresses, a mini bottle of prosecco, nail polishes in our wedding colours as a little hint, a paper rose (which I plan to incorporate into the decor on the day) and a notebook for the Maid to help her stay organised. I also wrote a list of her duties on the first couple of pages. 

  
Finally, I folded a piece of tissue paper to cover over all the presents, and topped it off with a “Save the Date”. 

  
The girls seemed really pleased with their boxes and I really enjoyed putting them together. I’d love to hear how you asked your girls to be part of your big day. I’m looking forward to sharing a few more of these crafty blogs with you, including how I made our Save the Dates, paper roses and shortbread.