Etsy Love: Gift Giving

I know...I've been a bad blogger. Truthfully, I didn't have much motivation to do wedding blogging after the wedding was over, but a couple of things happened in the last couple of weeks to make me break out the Blogger pages:

1. A very lovely couple contacted me to find out if I was interested in selling the many jars I had collected from our centerpieces because they, too, would like to do something similar. It was awesome both to get rid of the jars that had been taking up space in my house and hear that local brides were actually reading my blog and even finding it helpful.

2. Not too long after that, we discovered that a slow water leak under our house had been basically turning our house into a sauna, which led to extensive mold damage to a lot of items we were storing in our guest room, and a lot of those were wedding items. By wedding shoes (which I did plan to wear again) were totally ruined. Our cute little card tree went in the trash. But the most upsetting? My gown has mold damage. Yup, you heard me. I am going to take it to a preservation/cleaner for a consult to see if they can save it.

So, with so many of our little momentos thrown out in the trash this weekend, I wanted to revisit some of the things that made our wedding, in our opinions, awesome.

Let's start by wrapping up the Etsy Love category with attendant gifts.

We had a really hard time deciding what to get our attendants. They were all brothers and sisters, and we wanted to get something that would not only be a nice gesture but also appreciated and, dare I say it, actually used.

For my sister and sister-in-law, I went with jewelry. Seems like an obvious choice, I know, but I spent hours shopping (both on and offline) trying to find just the right items that would be beautiful and personal. For my sister-in-law, I picked out this silver necklace from madebysam:

I had it personalized with a citrine stone, which was doubly significant because yellow was one of our wedding colors and happened to be my sister-in-law's birthstone. For my sister, I picked out this owl-riffic number from LittleGreenRoom:

In case you haven't noticed, owls are kind of a thing with me, and that all started with my niece and a pair of owl pajamas I gave to her before she was born. Continuing the owl theme seemed extra important when I saw that this necklace featured and owl that the designer called "Hedwig, the protector." Given everything that has happened to my sister, she needs any extra protection she can get.

For the men, we gave them all the same thing: silver guitar picks with their initials engraved on them from bellabuttondesigns. Sounds kinda silly, but all the men involved each play some form of stringed instrument, and music has been a big role in all of our collective lives. I think they were well received.