My maid of honor box cost me eleven dollars. The version I almost bought online was forty-eight, and half of that was a tiny bottle of nail polish I knew my friend would never open. So I sat on my living room rug the Sunday after I got engaged, a coffee going cold on the windowsill, and I made my own instead.
Here is the trick nobody puts in the cute Pinterest photos. The box itself is cheap. The kraft container, the shredded paper, the little candle from the dollar aisle, all of it is nothing. What you actually pay for, when you buy one ready-made, is the printed card asking the person, and that is the one part you can do at home for the price of a sheet of cardstock. So that is where I spent my effort and almost none of my money.
I tested every card below by printing it on plain paper first and laying it inside the box to check the size. A couple were too big and I had to scale them down before I touched the good cardstock. The ones here are the ones I would buy again, and a few I actually did. Some links are affiliate links, so if you grab one it tosses a little something my way. Costs you nothing extra.
Heads up, some links here are affiliate links. Grab a template through one and I get a small cut, no extra charge to you.
The card that does the asking for you
This is the one that goes in the bottom of every box I make. You open it in the browser, swap in her name, and the line spacing already sits where it should. I typed “Hannah” into mine, printed a test on copy paper, and it fit the kraft box with a thumb of room on each side. No fighting with text boxes at midnight.
I ran the real ones at a print shop on Beale Street because my home printer leaves a faint streak down anything with a dark border. Came out crisp, eighty cents a card. My only gripe is the default font is on the delicate side, so I bumped the size up two points so my grandmother could read it without her glasses. One wasted page and then it was fine.
The little card that saved me forty group texts
I added this one after my first box, when my cousin texted me three separate times asking what color the dresses were and whether she had to pay for her own hotel. So I filled this in with the date, the dress code, the rough cost she should plan for, and slid it under the candle. Suddenly everyone had the answers without asking me.
You edit the fields right in the file and it lines them up for you, which I appreciated at eleven at night. I printed mine double-sided to save paper. The catch is the back side wants exact margins or it shifts, so check the back lines up before you commit a stack. I learned that after printing six crooked ones.
When a picture says it better than I can
For two of my girls I am sentimental and a plain card felt thin. This one drops a photo right in, so I used a blurry phone shot of us from a rooftop in 2019 that we still laugh about. Printed it at the same shop, glossy, and it looked like something I paid real money for.
The photo slot does the cropping so I did not have to mess with sizing in some other app. Worth it for the friends who go back a decade. My one note is glossy paper shows fingerprints, so handle the edges only, or do what I did and wipe it with my sleeve right before it went in the box. Not elegant. Did the job.
The phrase that made my friend cackle
Not everything in the box has to be earnest. I dropped the PNG of this onto a plain tote from the craft store using iron-on transfer paper, and “it’s giving bridesmaid” got a genuine laugh out of my friend Priya, who does not laugh easily. Five dollar bag, suddenly a whole gift.
The SVG version is the one to use if you have a cutting machine and want it on a shirt or a tumbler. I went the lazy iron-on route on the kitchen counter and pressed too long the first time, so the edges got a little shiny. Lower your iron a notch and use a thin cloth on top. The second tote was perfect.
What ended up on the bachelorette shirts
This one stopped being a box thing and became the whole bachelorette weekend. I put “in my bridesmaid era” on matching shirts for the five of us before a trip to a lake house in October. Cheap blank tees, this design, an afternoon with the iron, and we looked coordinated in every photo without anyone spending thirty dollars on a pre-made shirt.
It comes ready to size up for an adult tee. I scaled mine to about ten inches across the chest, which read well from across a parking lot. The only thing I would warn about is white ink on a dark shirt needs a firm press, so do a test on an old shirt first. I cooked one good tee learning that.
The matching one for the youngest in the lineup
My fiance’s little niece, nine years old, was going to be in the wedding and absolutely needed to match her grown-up cousins. This is the junior version of the same phrase, and I ironed it onto a kids tee so she would not feel left out of the shirt thing. She wore it for a week straight, her mom told me.
Same deal as the adult one, just scaled smaller. I sized it to about seven inches so it sat right on a child’s chest. The adult size would have swallowed her. One thing, kids shirts run thinner, so I dropped the iron heat and pressed quick. Burned a corner of the first one before I figured that out. Keep a spare shirt handy.
The one extra thing in my sister’s box
My maid of honor got everything the others got plus this, because she is my sister and she earned a little more fuss. I cut the SVG on my friend’s machine in soft pink vinyl and stuck it on a stemless wine glass, which took me longer to weed than I want to admit. She still uses the glass.
If you do not have a cutting machine the PNG works fine as an iron-on or even just printed and framed in a cheap five by seven. I went the vinyl route and tweezered out every tiny letter at my kitchen table for half an hour. My gripe is the inner cuts on the letters are small, so go slow weeding or you will lose the middle of an O like I almost did.
The Questions I Get Most
How can I make a bridesmaid box cheaply?
Short answer, buy the box and filler from the dollar aisle and only spend real money on the printed card. I made mine for about eleven dollars each by grabbing a kraft box, some shredded paper, a tiny candle, and a chocolate bar, then printing the proposal card myself at the copy shop for under a dollar.
The pre-filled boxes online charge you forty plus dollars mostly for filler nobody keeps. Skip the random nail polish and the mystery sachet. The card is the part she actually saves.
What is the cheapest filler that still looks nice?
Honestly, shredded paper from the craft store and a single dollar-store candle did most of the work in mine. A bag of paper shred is a couple bucks and fills the whole box so it looks generous even when it is mostly air.
A friend asked me this and I told her to add one chocolate bar with a nice wrapper and call it done. The eye reads it as full. Nobody is counting the items, they are reading the card.
How long does it take to make a box?
Once the cards are printed, about ten minutes a box. The slow part is the printing and the trip to the shop, so do all the cards in one go.
I made five in an evening on my living room floor with a movie on. The first one took twenty minutes because I was fussing with how the shred sat. By the fifth I was done in five. Batch it and you save yourself a whole second night.
One Last Thing
The boxes I made cost me about eleven dollars each. My sister still drinks out of the wine glass, and the lake house shirts are in everyone’s camera roll, so I think the eleven dollars stretched pretty far.
If you only buy one thing off this page, make it a card you can edit at home. That is the part people keep in a drawer for years. The dollar-store candle melts, the chocolate gets eaten, but the little card asking her stays. Mine is on my friend’s fridge two years later.