Wedding Festivities
Wedding Gift Guide: Ideas For Throwing a Recipe or Kitchen Themed Bridal Shower
21 month ago
Calling all family and friends of the bride-to-be! We know how stressful it can be to put together the logistics of a bridal shower, not to mention the immense pressure you feel to create a beautiful, special and memorable day that you know the bride will love. But never fear – PMall is here! We’ve put together some great tips so you have everything you need to help you host the perfect bridal shower!
These unbelievable, almost-too-pretty-to-eat Kitchen Cookies from The Adventures of Sugarbelle blog had us instantly inspired to come up with ideas for a kitchen themed bridal shower (we first saw the picture on Pinterest, but you can find the recipe and decorating tips for creating these beauties here). We think these pretty treats would not only add some fun to each table, they’ll also make great favors that each of your guests can take home with them!
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves – the first thing you need to do after setting a date and securing a location is work on the bridal shower invitations. But before we talk about creating beautiful bridal shower invitations like this, this or this, we need to go over the focal point of the kitchen themed shower.
The purpose of any bridal shower is to help the bride start off her married life with a kitchen and home full of everything she needs but with our personalized tips and ideas, you’ll also be helping her build a kitchen and home that’s hers.
The From The Kitchen Of… Personalized Recipe Cards, which come in both 3×5 and 4×6 sizes, or any of our other Personalized Recipe Card Designs will help you achieve both of those goals because while they do make a great gift (a gift that she’ll actually use!) all on their own … they will be extra special when you announce that you’ve had the bride’s family and friends fill them out with their favorite recipes!
In order to surprise her with this gift you’ll have to personalize enough cards (they’re sold in sets of 24) so you can include 1 or 2 of them with each of the bridal shower invitations (we also suggest personalizing an extra set of recipe cards that you can leave blank so when you present them to the bride she can add her own favorite recipes to her collection). When you’re creating the invitations, make sure to include a line somewhere on the invite that says “Please fill out the recipe cards and bring them to the shower. Write down 1-2 of your most favorite recipes to help us start the bride’s recipe collection!” Send the invites off and you’re well on your way to creating a one-of-a-kind gift that will be a bridal shower show stopper!
The final part of the gift is to personalize the From The Kitchen Of… Bamboo or Clear Acrylic Recipe Box for the bride. We suggest trying to match the theme of the recipe box to the theme of the recipe cards, however we also offer different designs for you to choose from in our Personalized Recipe Box Department, including a Personalized Recipe Binder that would also work well for this gift. These recipe boxes are excellent additions to anyone’s kitchen – the lids on the bamboo recipe boxes feature a slit that can hold a recipe card upright while you’re cooking and the acrylic recipe box lids not only hold the recipe cards upright, they also protect them from food splatter!
We suggest quietly collecting all of the recipe cards from the guests as they arrive so when the bride opens the recipe box you’ve personalized for her, you can surprise her with all of the recipe cards that her loved ones have filled out. Just think of how special it will be for her to receive secret family recipes, the directions for making her future husband’s favorite meal from his mom, or the recipe to her favorite dessert that her aunt makes and brings to every holiday party. You’re not only setting her up with a good start to a recipe collection, you’re giving her the opportunity to surprise her husband with his favorite dinner from growing up, or to recreate her favorite holiday meals that she’s enjoyed since she was a little girl – there won’t be a dry eye in the place!
Of course we also have a way for you to lighten the mood again – bridal shower games! Now stop groaning (yeah, we heard you!), these aren’t the same ol’ games that you’ve seen done a million times … they’re kitchen-themed and interactive! We loved all of the ideas they offered on this Kitchen Bridal Shower Games post, but especially the Spice Quiz. To set up the game you remove the labels from 10 jars of spices and assign each of them a number. Pass the spices around to each of the tables and ask the guests to guess which spice it is that they’re seeing, smelling, and (if they’re brave) tasting. The person with the most correct guesses wins and the bride can keep all the spices to stock her kitchen!
If you’re looking for bridal shower gifts in addition to the recipe cards and boxes, check out our Personalized Entertaining and Home Gifts Store - especially the Kitchen and Grill Department or head over to the Kitchen, Bar and Home Department in our Personalized Wedding and Anniversary Gifts Store where you’ll find more great bridal shower gift ideas that every bride will love.
If you have any other tips for throwing a kitchen bridal shower please share with us and all of our fans by posting in the comments below!
Think Outside The Gift Box: Unique Wedding Guestbooks
08 months ago
Here at A Personal Touch we LOVE to put a creative, personalized and unique spin on everything. So you can imagine how excited we’ve become now that we’re seeing couples thinking outside-the-gift-box when it comes to their wedding guestbook! Instead of setting out plain ol’ guestbooks, brides and grooms are getting creative and are coming up with unique items and ways for people to sign in and we can’t wait to tell you all about them!
As always, we stumbled upon our favorite idea from Pinterest! We saw the photo at left and were thrilled to see that people are personalizing canvases, like PMall’s Wedding Memories Photo Canvases, with one of their engagement pictures and having people write a little message and signing their names!
We love the idea that it’s more personal and people get to leave special notes for you but also because once everyone signs the canvas you have a beautiful, one-of-a-kind keepsake that you can hang in your home! It’s like getting 2 things for the price of 1 … and who doesn’t love that!?
To make matters better, PMall has a wide selection of Wedding Canvas Designs that offer you choices for even more of a unique twist to the guestbook! Some of the photo examples at right show how you can personalize an artistic canvas without a photo, like the Heart Rock design (top left canvas in photo at right), or another beautiful design like our popular Wedding Vows canvas (top right) which features the most important words you’ll say on the big day! The Forever and Always theme (bottom left) is a great example of how you can create a canvas in different sizes and shapes and also with the option to include more than one photo and the Photo Sentiments design (bottom right) is a great way to create a canvas with a photo and text that is important to you. You can use your personal vows that you’ve written yourself, a favorite quote, or even the lyrics from the song you will first dance to as husband and wife – the options are endless!
Believe it or not, the new guestbook trend doesn’t stop at pretty canvases. As you can see from the photo we came across on Pinterest (at left), people have been creating personalized photo puzzles, like the Love Connection Photo Puzzle (at right), and having their guests sign or leave a note on the front or back of the individual puzzle pieces! We love how unique this idea is and thanks to the wide selection of PMall’s Personalized Puzzles, you can personalize a puzzle in many different sizes, shapes, colors, and designs – some even come with a personalized tin to store them in! You can create one large puzzle (our largest puzzle includes 551 pieces) or personalize a couple of smaller puzzles and after the wedding you can put them together and frame them for one big piece of art or a beautiful wall collage! Think of all the fun you’ll have spending time as husband and wife, reading all the sweet and funny notes your loved ones have left you as you put the puzzles together. You could even bring the puzzle along on the honeymoon to put together during your downtime!
The last outside-the-gift-box idea we wanted to share with you was one of the most unique ideas we came across while surfing Pinterest.
Brides and grooms have started putting out calendars and asking guests to sign on their birthday or anniversary. How creative is that!?
The only thing that would make this idea better is to use a photo calendar like PMall’s Through The Year Photo Wall Calendar (at right) so that it’s more personal and so you’ll have beautiful pictures to look at throughout the year! It’s a great way to learn all the important dates for your spouse’s family that you’ll need to know once you’re married and it’s a great way to break the ice between your guests, as well!
So what do you think!? Are you a fan of the new trend of unique guestbooks? Have you or are you going to use one of these ideas or one of your own? We’d love to hear all about them! Tell us by leaving a comment or by emailing us at social@pmall.com!
Share Your Recipe For The Perfect Summer ParTEA & Win!
010 months ago
There’s nothing better than a nice, refreshing sip of chilled ice tea on a hot summer’s day!
But after that heat wave we just had, we’re in need of a fun new tea recipe to help us get through the rest of the summer!
Whether it’s a concoction of tea and lots of other ingredients or regular tea with a new twist you’ve added to help spice it up, share your favorite tea recipe and you could win PMall.com’s Summer ParTEA Recipe Contest and take home your very own Personalized Beverage Server with Stand so you can serve and enjoy your delicious tea in personalized style at your next party!
To enter the contest, send an email with the subject line “Summer ParTEA Contest” to social@pmall.com before the contest ends on August 1st, 2012 with the following information:
1. Your full name and email address where we can contact you if you’ve been selected as the winner.
2. Your favorite Ice Tea Recipe and what you love most about it.
And it’s as easy as that!
The PMall Staff will read the entries and select their favorite recipe and the winner will be announced here on the A Personal Touch Blog on August 2nd.
So start trying out new tasty combinations or pull out your recipe book and find that trusty recipe you’ve loved for years – just make sure you do it before the contest ends!
We can’t wait to read all your entries – our mouths are watering just thinking about it!
Good Luck!
Personalized Ornaments Are The New Scrapbooks!
010 months ago
With PMall’s Christmas in July Sale going on this week I was looking through all of the beautiful Personalized Christmas Ornaments and started to realize just how special some of these ornaments can be!
There are a few unique PMall designs that are extra special because they help you capture a specific moment in time so in the future you’ll be able to use the ornaments to remember some of your favorite Christmas moments!
The My Wish List© Personalized Ornament, which you can personalize with any name, year and 4 items, can act like a mini scrapbook that helps you preserve some of your favorite holiday memories without all the mess! In the future you’ll look back and be thankful that you personalized the My Wish List design for each of your children year after year, because you’ll be able to reminisce about what toys and gifts they loved most each Christmas while they were growing up!
This adorable ornament can help you look back and remember some of their funniest and sweetest memories like when your son was going through his superhero phase and only wanted Spider-Man action figures and clothes (by the way, if your son is going through that phase now, you should check out our brand new line of Personalized Spider-Man Gifts!), or when your daughter asked Santa for a little brother or sister.
The ornament is usually only $12.95 but thanks to the Christmas in July Sale it’s marked down to just $10.35 from now through Sunday! Start your new tradition now and you’ll love having the opportunity to share all the fun stories with your kids when they’re older (especially when your daughter is older and fighting with her new younger sibling you can pull out the ornament and remind her that this is what wanted! 
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PMall’s exclusive designs not only help you capture your kids’ precious moments, but your whole family’s favorite moments, too! With the Our Family© Engraved Message Ornament you can create your own mini scrapbook that can display an entire year’s worth of family events. You can have this elegant glass ornament laser engraved with up to 9 lines of personalization – those 9 lines can include your family’s name, address or your favorite family highlights of the past year, such as your vacation spots, activities, inside jokes and anything else you can think of! This beautiful ornament is usually $14.95 but is currently 70% off and can be personalized for only $4.48! Now that’s a deal you can’t pass up! Just think you’ll be able to start a new tradition where every year when you’re decorating the tree, you’ll be able to look back as a family and remember each year’s fun vacations and important accomplishments and help decide as a family what you’d like to include on the following year’s ornament!
But you don’t need to have kids to create one of these “scrapbook ornaments.”
The Our Life Together© Personalized Couple’s Ornament is the perfect way for newlyweds to remember the details of their wedding while also starting their own ornament collection as a married couple! The stunning glass ornament is usually $14.95 but is on sale for only $4.48 until Sunday and can be engraved with the couple’s names and up to 9 lines of personalization. If you’re personalizing it as a wedding keepsake you can include the ceremony’s location, date, the first song you danced to, the flowers you used and more.
However, I think this design is a perfect way to celebrate your anniversary year after year – after all, who says you have to save this beautiful gifts for Christmas!? Each year you can personalize it with all your firsts (vacation, purchasing a home, adopting a pet, etc.), triumphs (promotions at work, buying a new car, getting pregnant) and struggles that you went through and overcame together (losing a job or loved one) so you can look back and be proud of what you have made it through together as a team.
Whether it’s for your anniversary, your kids or your entire family, you are sure to find the perfect PMall Personalized Christmas Ornament for you! So put down the glue stick, close the scrapbooks and stow the memory boxes … forget about all of the fuss and head over to PMall to create a one-of-a-kind keepsake before the Christmas in July Sale ends Sunday, July 8th!
It may only take you a couple minutes to create your gorgeous personalized ornament, but you’re sure to enjoy your little time capsule for many years to come!
Have You Seen The Gift Everyone Is Talking About!?
010 months ago
Wow! It looks like PMall.com is going to have to make room in the Customer Favorites Store for the gift that everyone seems to be talking about!
Our Mr. & Mrs. Self-Inking Address Stamper has been making the rounds on Pinterest - so much so that it was featured on Pinterest’s Popular Page and has made appearances on the main Wedding & Events Page numerous times!
People have been “pinning” it like crazy onto boards with names like ”Wedding Gift Ideas” “Products I Love” and “I WANT!” with brides leaving comments saying the stamp was their “favorite wedding gift,” a ”time saver and life saver!” or their “secret weapon!” With all the buzz our personalized gift has created, we wanted to make sure we shared what everyone is talking about with our A Personal Touch readers!
There seem to be 4 main reasons why people are falling in love with our stamp:
1. The “cute” design! We’ve never seen the word “CUTE!” written so much! Brides love the hearts and the ”Mr. & Mrs.” theme and since it’s a PMall exclusive design, they know they’re getting a one-of-a-kind gift they won’t find anywhere else!
2. It’s “very affordable!” The stamp is only $24.95 (or hurry over to PMall now because as of this posting, the stamp is on sale for just $21.20!) so you can save a bundle buying the one stamp instead of paying big bucks for a large amount of return address labels, especially because …
3. It’s self-inking! You don’t have to spend extra money on a separate ink pad plus you get to pick out which color you want the stamp to be (you have the option to choose 1 of the 5 available colors: black, blue, red, purple and green)! And last but not least …
4. It “saves soooo much time!” Instead of spending a ton of time writing each return address label by hand, peeling off stickers or licking gross-tasting labels, all you’ll have to do is press down once and you’ll have a professional-looking stamp that adds a personal touch to your invitations or Thank You notes!
See for yourself what everyone is talking about by reading the comments people are writing on just one of several “pins” that we’ve seen all over Pinterest!
But don’t worry; you don’t have to be a bride or wedding guest to enjoy the benefits of this cute gift idea! PMall’s Personalized Stationary Store has a wide selection of Personalized Return Address Label Stamps that people are falling in love with, too!
In addition to the Mr. & Mrs. design, the Your Names© Stamp (at right) 
and the Namely Yours© Stamp (at left) have started to become popular on Pinterest, as well!
So now that you know all the benefits and have heard all the great things people are saying, head over and check out all of PMall’s Personalized Address Stamps so you can start saving time and money like everyone else!
