DIY: Wedding Water Bottle Labels

For our out-of-town gift bags we decided to put in two bottles of water, and to jazz it up a bit we decided to customize the labels. It was a good way to use our engagement photos. The wonderful Erich Camping came to Washington, DC to take our photos since he was unavailable for our wedding day. My family loved it so much that we decided to label some of the water bottles for the reception as well.

People kept commenting about this so we feel that it was very much worth the effort -- it was a little detail that stood out. However, we created five designs and people at the reception were trying to 'collect all 5' and I'm worried that's a reason why the water ran out (it was a hot day to begin with but with people hording... not a good idea). So if I had to do it again, I would limit the designs to two or three.

Product: We ordered the 8.5" x 2" waterproof labels from Online Labels* (they come in virtually any quantity and various sizes that you could imagine). The labels we ordered fit around Aquafina water bottles. In the end we found Eco-fina (Aquafina's eco-friendly line) at Sam's Club and the labels needed to be trimmed a little bit on one of the five designs for it to fit without overlap.

Design: Online Labels has downloadable templates which were easy to use and we had no troubles printing on them. For the design, we just took a photo and popped it in and added our names, wedding date and a quote/verse. We kept it simple. Here is how they turned out:

We had our engagement photos taken at the Franciscan Monastery in Washington, D.C.
These are screen shots of the design which accounts for the squiggly red line. I also added the black border to help visualize what it looks like.

It was a perfect day: hot but not blistering and sunny.

Tips for taking engagement shots: bring water, wear comfortable shoes, and you do not have to wear the same color as your significant other. I really like how the red and the blue works in the photos.

This design incorporates our "Shuffle off to Buffalo" theme for the wedding.

We wanted to take our engagement photos at the tidal basin with the Cherry Blossoms, but they came too quickly and ended too soon, so by the time Erich got to DC we decided to have a plan B, and we still got beautiful flowers!

It was super easy to put these labels on the water bottles. We put them on four cases of bottles in under 20 minutes. It's as simple as tearing off the labels and attaching the new ones.

Other options: we also looked into printing the designs on plain white paper using a laser jet printer, and I even tried it to see if the color would run with water....and it didn't. However we decided that it would be too laborious (print out, measure each one perfectly, hand cut out or pay Fedex kinko's to cut them out, and glue them on...and wait for them to dry).

Plus, the price of the labels was very reasonable: 9 cents a piece. Totally worth it!


* Product Number OL1985LP; 5 labels per sheet; weatherproof polyester laser