Groomsman Gift - The idea that kept evolving....

As I mentioned in the first post, I was engaged to get married to my fiancée, and on December 20th we finally tied the knot up in Alexandria, LA.

As everyone knows, the groom typically gives a gift to his groomsman for helping with the wedding proceedings and all this associated with it on his end. So I'm not a huge fan of useless items that never get used, but you feel obligated to hold on to it, because someone gave it to you for being in their wedding five or ten years ago. So I decided to look for a gift that was practical and useful.

For all that have not met Pinterest and Etsy, trust me, they are your friend when looking for ideas. I searched on both for ideas for a groomsman gift and finally found an idea right around Thanksgiving, a railroad spike knife. I clicked through Pinterest into the Etsy store, only to find out it was a blacksmith that was located 5 minutes from my office. When I say I could literally leave my car at the office and walk to his shop, I mean it.

I started looking through his designs and found the one I wanted, the cottonmouth. The best part of the gift was that my family and future-in-laws only thought the gift was for the groomsmen. I recognize the importance of other men in my life, my father, my father-in-law, and my uncles, who flew to Louisiana from Pittsburgh, PA for my wedding. So I ordered the knives from CineScape Studios in Baton Rouge, LA with the hope that they would all get made in time, since he hammers each knife by hand with no other workers.

Terry at CineScape Studios called me to pick them up and they were amazing but I couldn't figure out how to wrap them up and give them to the guys. I searched for a small gift box at Walmart, Target, Hobby Lobby, Michaels, Dollar General, Winn-Dixie, and Hallmark to put the knives in, but none were the right size. They were either too small or extremely too big for the knives. So I decided to just build a wooden box to put each knife in.

I went to Lowes and bought a few pieces of lumber, cut it on my miter saw, then nailed it together. I added a top piece of wood to the top of the box as a lid using two small hinges. I then stained it and let it dry for about 3 hours.

After it was dry, I used some purple, gold, and green (Mardi Gras) tissue paper to line the inner box to place the knife on top of. After closing the lid, I wrapped each box with some twine and got ready to give it to the guys.