Handmade Wedding Gifts

We have heard a lot lately about folks getting engaged and planning weddings in the last few weeks. I guess the holidays is a good time for those kinds of plans and announcements to be set in motion. We had a big family wedding in our family this year, so the excitement of the event was a real highlight for us. And its time to start thinking about handmade gifts for those upcoming weddings.

One of my favorites from our wedding is really a very simple, inexpensive gift that came to us from an older woman who was a member of one of the churches that I served when my wife and I were married. Pearl, a dear member of our community, took the invitation to our wedding that she had received and embellished it with water colors. After that, she bought some fancy lace and framed it as a gift for us. I really do treasure it as a memory of those days.

This simple gift is proof to me that some of the best gifts we can give or receive are handmade. This particular gift was a very popular one in the elegant community of Portsmouth, Virginia in the early part of the twentieth century. Invitations themselves were fairly dear since desktop printing was not even a dream, and the act of painting and embellishing the work added a personal touch.

If you have some weddings that you expect to attend in the coming year, what sort of handmade gifts might you start preparing now that some young couple will admire many years from now when they are growing old? I suspect they will still want an air fryer or fine china, but add to that some object made will love by your own hands.