Wedding Party Proposal Boxes

It’s wedding planning time!! 👰🏾🤵🏾✨

Our engagement announcement photo (shot by me w/ a self timer)

For those of you who don’t know, Tariq Ali and I have been engaged for a year as of October this year. I had been holding off on planning due to the obvious (COVID-19) as well as the fact that we purchased our first home earlier this year. It’s been a crazy year – again, there’s the obvious but that’s not all – I was laid off right after we bought our house, which coincidentally was the first month of the quarantine. I was very lucky we’d closed on our house about a month before, and was fortunate enough to pick up some contract work during the year with Amazon and Logitech (very happy to say that as of writing this I have accepted a full-time remote role with Logitech!) Sooo now that we’re much more financially stable, we’ve finally started wedding planning! Our wedding is in February of 2022, so realistically we are by no means behind. But it feels good to finally be checking things off on the wedding planning list. We’re officially having a wedding!

We’ve booked our venue, photographer and videographer, and then – because everyone is quarantined and let’s be honest, there’s still a lot of time till the “I do’s” – we decided to propose to our wedding party with some personalized gift boxes. It started as me scrolling aimlessly on Pinterest, and blew up into us at UPS mailing out ten proposal boxes. Two out of my eight bridesmaids are outside of Georgia (I hand delivered the rest of mine from 6+ ft away with a mask on), and all of Tariq’s are 5 hours away or more. It was such a fun little DIY project and since we didn’t have an engagement party or anything I thought it would be nice to revive the blog to show them off!

Naturally, blush is a major color in the pallet. It’s a well-known fact that I’m high-key obsessed with rose gold. So of course the bridesmaid dresses are rose gold/blush, and the proposal boxes had to be rose gold to match. I tried to do as many cute custom gifts inside the box as possible, I didn’t want to give them “bridesmaid” swag that they wouldn’t have a use for after the wedding, so everything I chose was something that I would love to receive as a gift. Hand-made lavender soy candles, custom gold-plated name necklaces in their fav jewelry color, cute lil detail cards with the venue and dresses (designed by moi of course 😉), the works. I even broke out the Avery templates to make initial stickers for the cards!

But I’ll stop talking for now and let the photos speak for themselves!

SHOWN: Cotton & Lavender Fields Candle w/ Custom Label, Name Necklaces, Fake Roses, Brown Gift Slip w/ Hemp String, Rose Gold Gift Boxes, Blush Organza Ribbon, White Crinkle Cut Paper

I’m very happy to report that all of my lovely ladies said “yasssss”. They loved their boxes, and their reactions, which varied from screaming to crying to just flat out stating “of course”, completely vindicated this seemingly silly idea to do gift boxes for them – in lieu of being able to get together – in the midst of all the craziness that has been 2020.

As an added bonus, I’ve included some photos of the groomsmen boxes that I helped my fiancé put together. Enjoy!

All in all this was a really fun project to put together. It was awesome to pull out my self-healing mat from college and use my Exacto blade for the first time in years. Being a designer by trade, and having about a million jobs/side hustles running at any given time (the main reason why I can only manage to update this blog every other year or so 😆), I really miss fine art and working with my hands. So this was a welcome break to laying out web pages. One thing that I’m focusing on this year is reconnecting with my hobbies, like paying violin, drawing, reading for fun, and blogging. I’m even considering taking up knitting to tell you how I’m doing mentally at month 10 of quarantined living, ahaha. Overall I know I’m blessed, and I’m sooo enjoying planning our wedding as a distraction to the waking nightmare that is 2020.

To follow along on our wedding planning escapades, check us out on the gram @yeswecayne. With any luck it won’t be another year before I update this blog again. Here’s to somewhat resembling consistency going forward 🥂

- Kelly Rose