Within days of getting engaged I already had a pretty solid theme in mind. I wanted rustic, vintage, and outdoorsy. This would allow my fiance and I to blend my vintage side, with his families farming heritage, with our mutual love of the outdoors. Perfect! I also knew I wanted to use handled mason jars for the drinks. I was so enthusiastic about this I wrote a whole blog post about it. I found a great deal on them at The WEBstaurant Supply Store, but since I knew they would take up a lot of space I was delaying on ordering them. I was certainly glad I did!
Did you know if you have your wedding within the confines of a park you cannot use GLASS drinking vessels? I certainly did not know this. You cannot use glass for regular drinks, beer, or even coffee. If it is meant to be carried around - then it can be dropped and broken. You CAN use glass like Mason jars or vases for centerpieces and for toasting flutes, but even if you have wine glasses on the tables they must be plastic. You can however use real china for the plates.
We will be having our wedding at a historic home that is owned by a park. The caretaker of the home and grounds said that no matter how careful people are, they will drop glasses out on the patio or in the grass and they break. She also said that if this happens, guests will not tell anyone out of embarrassment and eventually someone will step on the glass. I understand this all too well. My fiance and I spend almost every weekend in the summer hiking at parks and we practice "pack outs". Basically this means we bring a trash bag with us and pick up garbage people have thrown away in the woods. Most of it are beer cans, and broken beer bottles. It is very dangerous for children when people discard glass and other sharp garbage in parks.
Hallelujah! New this year (2014) I discovered that some online merchants are carrying PLASTIC mason jars. And yes, I have found examples with handles and plain ones. They typically have "Daisy Cut Lids".
If you type this into the Etsy search, you will find many sellers hawking these jars with different colored lids.
Since these are new to the market, I would imagine by summer everyone and their mother will be selling them and you can find them really cheap. Another plus is these plastic jars are MADE IN THE USA. They are also BPA free.
I also found HUGE plastic ball jars that hold a whopping 32 ounces. While I think these would be great for filling with ice and using for small backyard parties, I think that is way to much liquid to use for a wedding (there would probably be a lot of waste). They do sell 16 ounce Mason jars with handles under the Aladdin brand at Wal-Mart for around $7 a piece. I believe they sell these at Target too, but they are larger and $9.99 each.
I do think if I hold out until summer there will be multiple manufacturers selling the handled jars as cheaply as the plastic jars without handles. As of today there are nearly 700 sellers on Etsy selling plastic mason jars. Some of them even sell in bulk. The prices now are about $1 more a piece than what I had anticipated on paying for the real glass jars at The WEBstaurant Supply Store - which adds $150 to my drink glass budget. They do at least have lids. I think if I hold out and can find a seller who has free shipping that would shave nearly $50 off the total cost.
Currently, The Party Fairy on Etsy has listings where you can buy 100 jars with lids in bulk. With shipping added on you get 100 jars for $186.75. $36.75 of that is shipping, so, they are basically $1.87 each. The nice thing about this vendor is they also sell paper straws, treat cups, and adorable labels for the jars if you want to purchase those as well. All their stuff is color coordinated too, so likely this can be a one stop shop for you. I am going to e-mail them and see if they offer deals on custom orders since I would need 150 jars with lids and straws that all match. The only drawback is I wish they had handles...
After 6 1/2 years with my fabulously wonderful boyfriend, he finally asked for my hand in marriage! I am SO EXCITED, and I immediately started looking into venues seeing as we are eying an October 2014 wedding. After a few weeks of searching online and getting inspiration from Pinterest, we decided that a casual, laid back, rustic theme would work best for us. As a vintage dealer, I already have a lot of great decor and props to use and I wanted an outside wedding for sure - and DIY is a must for me since I want to have this wedding be as nice yet inexpensive as possible. What I do not have however are place settings for 125-150 people.
To save on cost and eliminate washing a zillion dishes we are going to have plastic plates and plastic "stainless steel look" silver wear. Using these, I found that we can get enough plates and utensils for everyone at about $1 per guest and they can be recycled. What I did not want however were plastic drinking vessels. If anyone has ever been to a party, barbeque, or wedding where plastic cups are used they can be a problem. First off, the "glass look" plastic cups that are more of a heavier weight cost just about as much as a real glass if you buy them from a place like GFS. Second, they really are not heavy enough to keep from tipping over or spilling.
This is important to consider if you are using tables in an outside venue because uneven ground can cause tables to "teeter" a bit and even the slightest bump can send 10 light weight glasses tipping over and spilling lemonade and iced tea into entrees or all over grandma.
So, this lead to me deciding that I wanted to use mason jars for drinking glasses. They are sturdy, bottom heavy, and quite frankly really cute for a rustic wedding! Furthermore, you can embellish them or personalize them to suit your theme. I went and looked at options in person at Target. They have a really decent canning section located in the Kitchen aisle. They have short "honey" jars, quilted jelly jars, and larger Ball jars in 12 ounces. They even had the limited edition blue jars! The picture above is for the 12 ounce jars they sell at Target - you get 12 for $9.99 which is a great price! These were not however the jars I wanted. I really wanted jelly jars with handles.
My reason for wanting handled jars is because I can embellish the handles instead of the rim of the glass. I have seen several pictures online where people tie twine or lace around the mouth of the glass that while cute, will probably get wet and it prevents guests from drinking from the vessel without using a straw. Another reason is that depending on the weather - October can be anywhere from about 55-85 degrees in Indiana - the glasses will probably tend to condensate. Dewy glasses can cause them to slip out of hands easily and I did not want to encumber the guests by using impractical jars especially since we will have a self serve drink bar and buffet style meal.
The problem with opting to use handled jars is that you cannot buy them in stores - anywhere. We went to Target, Walmart, and GFS locally and no one had the jars. We called Party City, and 5 different restaurant supply stores in Indianapolis and NONE of them carried the jars either. One of the companies was curious and called us back and said they could order them, but they would be about $2.50 a piece considering we would have to drive to Indy to get them. We did find some of the jars at Jo-Ann Fabrics for $1.99 each but they only had about 20 and could not guarantee that they could get/order more. So, I started to look online. I found them easily on Amazon and Ebay but the shipping was going to cost as much as the jars themselves. The average price I found when shipping had to be paid in addition to the jars was between $1.91 and $2.12 each. That was until I found The WEBstaurant Store online.
These were EXACTLY what I was looking for! If you buy 3-59 they are $10.42 a flat and there are 12 glasses per flat. If you buy in lots of 60, they are $8.74 a flat. BUT, that is NOT the best part! The best part is that shipping is basically nothing! I was having sticker shock when I found that Amazon was charging almost $35 for shipping and large lots of the jars on Ebay could run up to $60 just in shipping. These glasses for shipping to my home makes them out to only be about $0.94 a glass. That is about $1 less each compared to other stores. The above picture is from the WEBstaurant Store and these are what I am ordering for use in my wedding. They do NOT have lids but if you wanted lids they sell them separately from the same site.
Since I milled over glass options for about 3 weeks, I will share my tips for you to consider if you plan on using mason jars for your big day!
Size: Keep in mind people will be using these for cold drinks and therefore they will likely have ice. The small jelly jars are very cute because of their shape and the fact that they have a quilted pattern on the glass. When I saw these at Target I thought they would be "perfect" until I considered ice. The small jelly jars are only 8 ounces and are pictured above from Target - so with ice you will only get about 4 ounces of liquid inside them. As a result, guests will be getting up and down all night to refill. If you have a caterer who will be serving drinks the same problem applies - all the guests will be waiting for a server to refill them and the servers will be running like mad. The smaller quilted glasses might be good for beers on tap however...hummm...
Lids: Lids can be cute especially if you are going to give the jars away as favors at the end of the night. But, if they are being used as glasses I would think that the lids might get left behind and would look tacky cluttering up a table at dinner. Furthermore, if you use true canning lids, they are in two pieces so there are two things to lose, misplace, or get left behind. Also you have no real way of attaching the lid unless you get fancy lids with loops at the top (Pictured above from Factory Direct Crafts). I personally am going to have each jar at a table setting with a straw in place and not have the lids.That brings another issue into the spotlight - you will have 150+ jars left over at the end of the night if you do not give them away!
What to do with the Jars?: If you are buying these yourself, you will have 150+ jars to deal with after the reception. If you have the storage, you could use them for future dinner parties and barbeques but really, who will need that many jars again? Unless you want to take up candle making and sell them on Etsy there are a few options. You can resell them on Craigslist or through Facebook, or there will likely be a young couple at your wedding who might be tying the knot in the next year or two who would love to reuse them. You could also run an ad and rent them out. I looked at the local miscellaneous rental place to see if they actually rented these kinds of jars, but they did not. When I did a Google search, I only found a few places that actually rented them and they were located mostly in southern states.
Lack of Handles on Jars: Like I stated before, without a handle I feel that the jars would be cumbersome if they were to "sweat" and would be more likely to slip out of hands. This also becomes a problem if you decorate handle-less jars with something like a band around the center. If the jars sweat, the decoration will fall off and hands will cause whatever you tied around them to slip. Jars without handles do look amazing though as containers for center pieces or candles!
Keeping the Silver Canning Lid Ring on the Jar: If you use true canning lids, you can have the option of keeping just the silver ring around the mouth of the jar, which I must admit looks really nice. This also gives you the option of tying twine or lace beneath the silver lip which would make it easier for drinking from the glass. BUT - if you do this TEST THEM ALL OUT before you give them to guests. I have quite a few true canning jars that once contained BBQ sauce. I used them for drinks once and kept just the silver ring on the mouth of the jars because I liked how it looked. Well one leaked under the silver ring when it was drank from and it made a mess. These lid rings are threaded so they *should not* leak, but it is one of those better safe than sorry kinds of things.
Don't Forget Straws!: Using your own rustic jars for drinks gives you the green light to incorporate fun straws into your theme. You can get paper straws in virtually any color now a days online and at Hobby Lobby. The ones featured above from Kikkerland are from Bed, Bath, and Beyond and you get 144 of them for $4.99. SUPER cheap and if you do not want to use red you can find them in "your colors" or even have them custom made from certain Etsy vendors. You can also get packs of 25 straws at Hobby Lobby for $2.99 and 3.99 a pack, and they have colors other than red and they have the super popular Chevron pattern.
More to come!!! I will be blogging about tips, finds, ideas, and all sorts of things pertaining to my October 2014 Indiana wedding. My wedding is going to be 100% DIY myself - everything from invitations, table decor, accessories, favors, gifts, place settings, etc. will be DIY with of course help from my fiance, family, and friends!
