Winery Tour Bachelorette with a Gryffindor Twist

Okay, how fortunate am I to have gotten to celebrate another one of my incredible friends with a bachelorette party this year?! Incredibly.

You can probably guess who the bride is from the shirts.

To celebrate Amanda’s upcoming wedding (eeeee! it’s this weekend!) we took her on a day full of winery tours in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Amanda’s a big Harry Potter fan (as am I, it’s one of the things we first bonded over when we met) so one of the other bridesmaids suggested giving her day a Gryffindor/Quidditch twist. Our theme was “Amanda Found a Keeper” (Keeper being a Quidditch position in Harry Potter) and I included touches of maroon and gold throughout (fun accident: maroon and gold were also our high school colours!).

In this post I’ll give you a bit of a rundown of the day and some fun stuff and go into some DIY details in future posts. You can find the favor bags, flying keys, golden snitches and chocolate frogs here! I used my Cricut to make our shirts for the day - Amanda’s says “I found a Keeper” and ours say “She’s a catch!”

Lianna also worked on the crazy cookies below. Sorry Li, I only had you in group pictures and I didn’t want to ask every person for permission to post!

I rolled these up and tied on tags with each girl’s name just so we wouldn’t have to dig around for sizes and fits - I collected information on size and fit from all the girls ahead of time.

This was a pretty simple process! I designed the shirts using Design Space and cut the Iron-On using my Cricut. I ordered the blank tshirts online and then I just had to weed the images and iron them on! I loved the metallic gold iron-on I used on the maroon shirts so much that I included a little gold snitch on the back of Amanda’s shirt too even though it didn’t show up as well on the white!

It was so hard to capture this metallic finish in a photo but I’m thrilled with how they came out!

Because most of our group was travelling from about an hour away I booked a bus to take us to Niagara-on-the-Lake, from winery to winery, and then back home for dinner. This meant no one had to drive and we could all relax and focus on having fun together.

We headed out around 11am and made it to our tasting at Lakeview Wine Co. around 12:15pm. Everything we sampled was great!

Drinking wine all day is fun but I wanted to make sure everyone walked away as headache free as possible - that means eating and hydrating in between! I brought a packed cooler with bottled water, apples, individual pasta salads, and what the girls deemed “adult lunchables.”

I wanted these to be like little travel charcuterie/cheese boards so I included a variety of crackers, some trail mix, prosciutto, chorizo, and four different cheeses: dill havarti, aged cheddar, a Babybel, and these adorable individual wheels of br… — I wanted these to be like little travel charcuterie/cheese boards so I included a variety of crackers, some trail mix, prosciutto, chorizo, and four different cheeses: dill havarti, aged cheddar, a Babybel, and these adorable individual wheels of brie!

I bought the lunch containers on Amazon and filled them the night before with the help of my parents and sister. I also filled some smaller cups with Costco pasta salad - FYI it’s amazing! We were so glad to have things to snack on all day long - I’ll definitely do this again!

My incredible friend & fellow bridesmaid Jess, along with her very talented mom and sister, made us the best cookies I’ve ever seen. They’re a little NSFW (though maybe not at first glance) and were a huge hit to look at in addition to being delicious!

The cookie genius herself is on Instagram @mama_oddi!

After Lakeview we headed to Jackson Triggs where we did a full tour and tasting and then hung out for a while on the patio enjoying the beautiful day.

At the beginning of the day I had given all the girls favor bags with some things they might need for the day and some fun treats I put together to go with the theme!

In terms of more practical items we’ve got tissues, a wet wipe, ibuprofen (to fend off those possible headaches I mentioned), mints, and hair ties.

In addition to my “practical” favor bag items I wanted to include some things to play on the theme. I decorated the bags with vinyl, attached some cardstock wings to Ferrero Rocher chocolates to make golden snitches, made colour-coordinated hair ties with fold-over elastic, and threw in these sweet little gold lightning bolt necklaces. I also made custom chocolate frogs with chocolate frog cards of the bride and groom-to-be which was a ton of fun! Lastly I found these little skeleton key bottle openers which I thought would be useful and I attached little vellum wings to mimic the flying keys from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. The wings are just attached with a dot of hot glue so the girls can pluck them off and keep the bottle opener around in a purse, on a keychain, or in a kitchen drawer! Click here to see more details on those DIYs!

We finished up at Caroline Cellars with even more tastings before heading back for dinner & drinks at Merit Brewing in Hamilton.

We finished off the night at one of the other bridesmaids houses and honestly had such a wonderful day. I’m so glad to have gotten to meet all these amazing ladies!