Manolo for the Brides

How cute are these itty-bitty bottles of soda with custom labels? Mike 78 recently posted an easy-peasy DIY pop bottle tutorial – with pics! – over at 100 Layer Cake. She suggests using them as reception seating cards, but brides and grooms could bottle just about anything (juice, cider, champagne, local water, etc.), slap labels on them per her instructions, and give them away as wedding favors. Maybe not for a chilly wintertime wedding, but imagine how grateful your guests would be to find themselves in possession of an ice cold drink custom made by you at your outdoor summer wedding or unseasonably warm springtime affair!

If you’re a bridesmaid looking to insure that people attending a bachelorette party or shower actually talk to one another or a bride who wants to be sure that no one will be bored at the reception, wedding-themed scratch-off tickets may be the answer. These scratch-off game cards are like lottery tickets, but instead of revealing that, no, you didn’t win any cash, they reveal trivia questions about the couple to be married meant to inspire discussion among bridal shower guests or wedding guests sitting at the same table.

It’s a cute idea for those with extra cash to spread around on useless-but-fun favors, but won’t be everyone’s cup of tea… especially since they can cost up to $1 per card, money perhaps better spent on a truly conversation-worthy cake. But that’s all right, since Mitsy at ArtMind has posted DIY instructions for scratch-off tickets you can customize any which way.

It looks easy enough to personalize with your own text and wedding colors — the hardest part would probably be coming up with and printing out the different cards.

I think it’s no secret that I’m not a big fan of the wedding favor. It’s not that I think it’s horrible, more that I firmly believe that it’s in the first line of what should be cut when your budget is tight. It’s not required, it’s often left behind making it wasteful, and really most of us are quite old enough to enjoy a party without taking home a toy prize to boot.

On the other hand, every once in a while something comes along that I think is kind of a fun idea for a favor if you’re interested in giving one. Just yesterday, my brother the medieval historian who has been playing and running RPGs (role playing games, for the uninitiated) since Dungeons & Dragons was three staple-bound booklets, brought just such a favor idea to my attention.

For some reason beyond my understanding, Word Press has decided not to allow me to post a picture today. Humph. (Note to Word Press: no, I will not be downloading another freaking browser! I already had to download Firefox because you won’t format correctly in Safari. It’s your turn to compromise. Wait a minute…I can add graphics on the other two Manolosphere blogs I write for. What’s the beef here?)

Anyway, until that gets sorted out, I guess all I can do is link to the pictures (and video) of the cute custom dice I’m talking about. They’re from Custom Dice.com and you can have them made up however you like.

Why dice as a favor? Well, they can fit a theme nicely, whether it’s ‘lucky in love’ ‘casino night’ ‘geeks in love’ or ‘we’re taking a chance.’ Dice are useful whether the person in question enjoys playing craps, goes dungeoning and dragoning on a semi-regular basis, or just keeps losing the dice to the Monopoly set. If someone doesn’t want them, someone else can probably use them. What’s more, they’re not expensive. Prices start at a dollar apiece for thirty standard sized dice with pips and your name engraved on them. A hundred translucent dice with a custom logo instead of pips run “less than a dollar and fifty cents each.” If your reception crowd runs more heavily to RPGers than board gamers or gamblers, you can get your dice with different numbers of sides (I saw at a glance four-sided and ten-sided as well as the standard six-sided dice)…you can even get dominoes, though I wouldn’t recommend that as a wedding favor unless you’re inviting a very small number of people all of whom are buggy about dominoes.

Are they for everybody? No. But if they’re for you, then roll the dice and have fun!

As I mentioned in a post last week, two dear friends of mine will be getting married quite soon. Ashley and her fiance are planning a low-key, outdoorsy wedding on Labor Day weekend and have only just started to plan because they only just got engaged. In addition to offering congratulations, I offered to help out by finding wedding inspiration they might like. For most (if not all) of this week, I’ll be using Ashley’s own words as my inspiration. Without further ado, off we go!

The wedding will be at 3 pm, reception to follow at my parents’ place on the Snake River. It will be a HUGE ASS BBQ involving all manner of food. There will be impromptu dancing, all manner of unscripted toasting, motorboat/fishing rides up and down the river, 4-wheeling for the boys, a bottomless open bar, and a campfire. There will be fireworks at dusk and general merriment until the last person stumbles off to bed.

While it’s not quite fireworks at dusk, sparklers are a fun way for wedding guests to add a little light to the bride and groom’s special day. In this picture taken by emtboy9, sparklers become wedding decorations when taken out of their boxes and put in what looks like a flower pot. Ashley could up the ante by displaying sparklers in decorativevases at each table, perhaps as a centerpiece.

(more…)

They say that if you’re going to invite your wedding guests to chuck things at you after you get hitched, it should be birdseed. The old “rice is bad for birds” myth aside, birdseed is nice in theory because it attracts interesting wildlife. Of course, tell that to anyone whose driveway has become a repository for bird droppings or who has had to pick tiny bits of birdseed out of the lace of their wedding gown, and you might get a different opinion.

If you do like the idea of feeding the birds but don’t want to get pelted with seeds, consider another method of birdseed delivery. Nature Favors makes heart shaped birdseed favors that aren’t meant to be tossed at the newlyweds — in fact, they’re not meant to be tossed at all.

Each birdseed heart wedding favor is formed around a 12″ bamboo stick and tied with natural raffia ribbon (and there are birdseed hearts on strings, too) — according to the seller, they should be given to the birds within 30 days of purchase unless you’re planning on freezing them for pre-wedding storage.

Oh, and if you’re wondering how best to discourage guests from tossing anything at you and your new spouse on your wedding day, I’d suggest you do what The Beard and I did, which was not give our guests anything to toss!

Wedding favors are a strange animal — more often than not, they’re kind of chintzy, which is easy to understand when you consider that brides and grooms are usually buying 100+ wedding favors. Most couples are not, therefore, buying $30 bottles of wine or kitchen implements for each guest. Instead, they’re buying wedding bubbles or rubber duckies. What amuses me is when you have a fairly common wedding favor advertised as something extraordinary.

Le Viette carries washcloth wedding favors and towels rolled up to look like desserts, and their tagline is “When indulgences are occasional, they should be exceptional.” At $7 to $9, they better well be exceptional, though as pretty as they are, I do have to wonder how good good the towels themselves are. I did, once upon a time, receive samples of less expensive washcloth wedding favors, and the resultant washcloths were suitable for use as kitchen rags only.

That said, it is a clever, kind of kitschy idea, but I wonder if the whole ‘food that really isn’t food’ bit isn’t just a tad confusing to some wedding guests.

So you’re leaning toward wedding desserts over wedding cake or you’ve decided that edible wedding favors are right for you and yours. If you want to lose the cake, but not the colors — you have to admit that wedding cakes are growing ever more gorgeous — custom cookies can be a pretty and unique alternative dessert or favor.

These tasty examples come from Better Batch Bakers, a cookie company in MA that ships its sweets via postal mail. The bakers and cookie designers at BBB will work with you to extend your wedding theme (or color scheme) into your dessert or wedding favors. Sure, they’re a little pricey at $3.25 per 2.5″ cookie, but that’s no more expensive than most other wedding favors or wedding cake serving prices out there.

If I was a less responsible person, I would have had chocolate for breakfast. As it is, I can’t call myself that responsible as lunch is likely going to be a muffin from a local bakery that tops and fills their baked goods with all manner of frosting and compotes and things. Pregnancy has given me a sweet tooth I never had before. To tide myself over until lunch, I found a quatro of sugary recipes for sweets that would make great (and easy-ish) DIY wedding favors.

Here we have beautiful homemade marshmallows, dainty French macarons, quirky pink popcorn balls, and cookies laden with heaping handfuls of more marshmallows. Follow the links below for the recipes.

• Strawberry marshmallows
• French almond macaroons
• Pink popcorn balls
• Happy bellies cookies

I’m in a pink wedding frame of mind, but you can switch up the hues for every potential wedding favor pictured here except the strawberry marshmallows, which are colored a delicate pink by the addition of strawberry puree. I think I could have baked up my own wedding favors (or even my own wedding cake) but I was dissuaded from doing so by well-meaning relatives. Are you going the kitchen-centric DIY route when it comes to your wedding favors?