Karisa Getting Married: Slap a Label on It

One Weddingbee post I keep returning to is Mrs. Cheeseburger's post on unnecessary wedding details, specifically because of her custom cocktail napkins. I think personalized napkins are cool to begin with, but using your favorite love quotes instead of just your names? Amazing idea! As a former English major and literature-inclined bookworm before that, I had occasionally come across sweet quotes throughout high school and college that I thought would be perfect for inclusion in a wedding somehow. Of course, when it came time to think of quotes for my wedding, I couldn't remember what most of them were. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The real problem was that Mr. Unicycle and I are cheapskates (well, I'm a cheapskate. He's frugal.), and personalized napkins are not cheap.

Image via Zazzle

I want this t-shirt. But it's too expensive.

First I checked prices at The Knot Wedding Shop and saw that they were having a sale on cocktail napkins that came with free personalization. I got super excited and laid the smack down on Mr. Unicycle to come up with some lovey dovey quotes before the sale ended. I romantically phoned him and said "DUDE the sale ends TONIGHT! Think of some friggin love quotes, pronto!" to which he replied "Well, I can't really think of any. Are we talking song lyrics, literary quotes, adages..." I interrupted him (the sale was ending soon; I didn't have time to listen to him babble): "ANYTHING. Email me your ideas by tonight or else." Okay, I wasn't this mean. Well, yes I was. Sales make me frantic.

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Frantic, and mean.

After I hung up with him, I realized that I also couldn't come up with any quotes. There was one quote I remember discovering in college that I couldn't remember no matter what I did. I could remember the name of my professor, the titles of every book we read in the class (I even still have all of them), and what I wrote my final paper on. But I couldn't remember what the quote was about or even which book it came from. I frantically flipped through each of the books from that class, looking for underlined love quotes to no avail. The only literary quote I could actually recall was one from Wuthering Heights that I'd fallen in love with when I was a lovesick, idealistic 17-year-old. When I rediscovered the quote I decided to nix it because it was a little too Twilight/obsessive-to-the-point-of-emotional-instability for my taste. Here's the quote:

"He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being." ~Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

Yeah, it's a little..much. I kind of like the sentiment, and it's kind of an eloquent way of describing the whole "soul mates" thing, but it was not the kind of thing you'd want on a cocktail napkin. I ended up choosing a less emo Wuthering Heights quote instead: "Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same."

After I peer pressured Mr. Unicycle into coming up with some quotes, I realized that the free personalization The Knot Wedding Shop provides was meant for smaller imprints like the couple's names and wedding date, or maybe a small image of bells or a heart. Our quotes, no matter how short, were not going to fit. That being the case, I doused the fire I'd lit under Mr. Unicycle and put the napkins on the back burner, since we were not longer relying on a sale. (For the record, The Knot seems to have sales all the damn time. And each sale is "the best of the year." And it's always "ending soon." Like Vista Print, in fact.)

Image via The Knot

I looked into For Your Party, which is the site Mrs. Cheeseburger used, but we didn't like the prices. As much as I'd love to share my love of Wuthering Heights with all of our guests, I really can't justify spending $65 on something our family would just use to wipe beef wellington crumbs off their mouths. I also checked out Napkins Personalized, but we still couldn't justify the price. They do send free samples though, and the quality was great.

I brainstormed how we could make this happen--I thought about trying to get a Yudu or a Gocco (if these can even be used on napkins...), seeing if I could run napkins through my printer (doubt it), and even ordering custom stamps from Etsy, before I decided to just forget about the personalized napkins. As Mrs. Cheeseburger's post pointed out, they are a completely unnecessary detail.

Fast forward a few weeks. I was looking for candy bags for our candy buffet, and I stumbled upon these gray and white polka dot paper bags from Hobby Lobby.

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Then I had a cartoon-lightbulb-above-the-head moment: what if we printed love quotes on labels and guests could use them as stickers to seal their candy bags? Labels are basically free, and this way we could come up with as many different quotes as we wanted! So I bought all the paper bags in the store (and ordered about 18 more packages), bought some square labels, and re-ignited the fire under Mr. Unicycle to get me his love quote ideas.

I used Avery stamps and was able to download a template for printing in MS Word. Then I merely inserted our quotes, printed page after page after page of labels, and cut them all apart.

Screenshot by me! No applause, just money.

I included my beloved Wuthering Heights quote of course, and one from Antoine de Saint-Exupery as a nod to my former francophilia. The Einstein quote reminds me of when I fell in love with Mr. Unicycle in physics class. He chose the Smashing Pumpkins quote (and a few more not shown), and the Lewis Carroll quote was inspired by Mrs. Mouse! But Mr. Unicycle is also a big Lewis Carroll fan (if you can simultaneously be a fan and be completely grossed out by someone). I found the other quotes online and I just liked them.

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I'll set the bags and labels on the candy buffet, maybe in this milk glass container since you guys thought it didn't go with the other containers I bought (and you're right). Each guest can fill a bag with candy and then select a quote sticker to seal the bag with so they can take the candy to go. Genius.