It occurred to me (almost a year later, whoops) than I never got around to sharing some of the DIY projects we did for our wedding. I waded through many of them and decided to scrap the posts – the pictures weren’t very good and they wouldn’t have made great content. However I do want to share how we DIYed our own wedding favors. Also, if these pictures look weird it’s because they were all taken in late-2010/early-2011 when we still lived at our old apartment and the lighting was crap.
Favors in general have traditionally been a pretty wasteful, throwaway reminder of a wedding. I think the trend nowadays is getting away from that and moving towards something a little more practical and, in many cases, edible. We were totally on board with that thinking and decided to do personalized M&Ms in cute brown kraft boxes. The kraft paper, the stamp we used on the boxes, and the baker’s twine we tied them with all applied to our theme of a travel/foodie wedding so it made sense.
The first thing we did was fiddle around designs/ideas on the Personalize Your Own M&Ms website. Here’s what we ended up with:
Since we wanted to wait and order the M&Ms as close as we could to the wedding so they would be fresh, we focused on gathering the rest of the supplies and getting them completed ahead of time.
I knew I wanted to use brown kraft boxes because they are rustic and look like bakery boxes. Also the envelopes for our wedding invitations were made out of kraft paper so it tied in very well. I found these 3x3x3 boxes on PackagingSupplies.com that were perfect. They were super easy to put together and pretty cheap ($40 for 200).
The first step to prepping the boxes was to stamp them all and cut the baker’s twine for the outside. The stamp we used for the favors was the same silverware stamp from PaperSource that we used on our wedding place cards and favors. I like subtle themes that are carried throughout for weddings.
We had about 110 guests so one night, while watching TV, I banged out about 120 stamped boxes.
Finally, in March 2010 (wow, that was 2 years ago, dang), we finally ordered our M&Ms. I’ll be honest, the personalized ones weren’t cheap. So we bought 10 lbs. of personalized M&Ms and about 4 lbs. of solid colors that matched for filler.
Even though the M&Ms were a bit pricier than we would have liked I am so glad we went with them. The service from the company was excellent, the quality was great, and our guests loved them. I would highly recommend buying them if you ever need favors for an event or special occasion.
Team Us! (in as close to our wedding colors of maroon and gold as we could get)
The next step was to portion out the M&Ms into food grade bags (which explains the use of the scale in the picture above, we weighed it all out to make sure we divided them evenly).
The final step was to stuff each favor box with a candy bag and tie it with baker’s twine.
The turned out pretty well if I do say so myself! Totally worth the DIY effort. It averaged out to about $4/person which, to us, was not bad at all. Even with a bulk discount, the usual favor/tchotchkes/useless junk are much higher. I was proud of what we came up with, it worked on all levels for our theme, and it was just us. And that’s the most important thing.
Domestocrat 