The Bar

So this is obviously a pretty important part of the wedding...it may be Jake's #1 priority! While I'm letting him and my parents deal with picking the types of liquor, beer and wines, I'm focused on making the bar fun, cute and pretty!!

The bar for our reception is up on a deck attached to the tent where we are having dinner. It's covered with an awning and it has the large glass christmas lights all around the edge of the awning (which I love - they add so much character!) So I want to hang yellow and green paper lanterns under the awning, just to give some color and fun...

(image from The Wedding Chat)

We are also butler passing mojitos during cocktail hour, as our signature drink, since we both LOVE them and they go well with our color scheme with all that fresh mint and limes!

I starting thinking about how I wanted to find or make some cute drink stirrers to put in the mojitos. I originally thought of doing ones with yellow ribbons tied onto them, like this:(image from Martha Stewart weddings)

I'm not planning on doing many (if any!) DIY projects because truthfully, I'm lazy and I'm way too busy with planning other people's weddings then trying to make a bunch of stuff. I fully respect brides who DIY their whole wedding, but that is just not me. So I scratched the ribbon idea because I couldn't see myself wanting to tie all those ribbons. That led me to these:

(image from The Knot)

I love these for several reasons -- 1. I can order these online for insanely cheap. 2. They require me to do nothing except click "submit order". 3. I wanted to bring in our date (09.05.09) in a FEW items without going overboard and I think this is just subtle enough.

SOLD! So now having the date on our stirrers, I focused on cocktail napkins. Let me tell you, there are SO many cocktail napkins out there, it makes my head hurt! Who knew!

I love these - super plain and simple with just our monogram and nothing else. I'm thinking we can do half yellow and half green with a navy monogram. Also, I'm not a huge fan of the super traditional wedding cocktail napkins with the scroll monogram and date below it. Again, no offense, that's just my personal style. So I think these will be perfect, they are classy and timeless! Plus, if we have some leftover after the wedding, we can definitely use them.

Having our monogram on the napkins and the date on the stirrers makes me happy!