The Incredible Bride

I went scouring my FAVORITE girly site over at iVillage (be careful) and made way over to their wedding section to find a couple (out of like 20 shown) wedding favors that can be DIY-ed. Although I am not one for DIY-ing anything when it comes to fashion, style and beauty (except for putting on my own makeup because I am not Kimora Lee Simmons…yet), but I think I could do a good job of putting these favors, below, together nicely. And please help me in thanking the Wedding Gods that these favors are NOT knick-knacky and I despise knick-knack type favors with a passion.

Anybody can put these together I guess or you can get someone with some skill to put it together for you inexpensively. After that, you can take that extra money you saved and apply it elsewhere in your wedding budget. Sweet! Speaking of the devil…here are some images of sweet favors that I got from iVillage.

Here are some tips from iVillage regarding putting chocolate bar favors together. 1. You can use your candy store’s Hershey Chocolate Bar, remove their wrapper and add your own with scrapbook paper. I know that all craft stores sell them and they usually come in 12x or lower sized sheets. You can also make your own wrappers and I’ll suggest a site that is owned by a friend of mine…the Wrapper’s Corner. 2. As for the lovely embellishments, you can go to a party store and order ribbon with your name and date on it and the bells can easily be picked up at a craft store as well. 3. Getting your wrapper to stick and seal is easy. You can use a tube of scrapbooking adhesive. 4. You can get your paper cut at a Kinko’s or Staples or office supply store OR you can just do it yourself with an inexpensive paper cutter and you can find this at any craft store located right next to the adhesive section. It’s this nice????

These are just too cute and some might say a waste of a nice embellishments, but hey, it’s for your wedding day so the more fine embellishments the better. Here are some tips for these candy ball favors that iVillage suggests mixed in with my own. 1. Recommended candy to use and you cannot go wrong with are the Jumbo Mint balls because they won’t melt and they just big enough to make this type of favorite look its best. 2. As for the paper on this favor, a nice quality tissue paper works here by layering maybe two sheets to every favor. 3. Ribbon can be found a craft store if you want to cheap out a bit, but the best ribbon can be found at a good papery store and you can order in special ribbon from there too. I’d also like to recommend buying from Martha Stewart as well, under her Crafting Essentials section. 4. Stickers are easy. You can order these from Ebay, DIY them or you can just buy standard, monogrammed sticker sets from a papery store, your local Kinkos or Staples. 5. Do NOT forget to cut the ends of your ribbon to add some style.

These favors work in any budget! Do you want to know what’s tackier than having knick-knacky favors for your guests?? …NOT having any favors for your guests at all and that’s sad.

Not to offend anyone and to start of negative, but I don’t care for wedding candy buffets. I’m not going to go into why I don’t care for them, but I will say this: wedding candy buffets are pretty and nice to look at, but they are cliched, uncreative and the candy is mediocre unless you’re serving gourmet delicacies which in most cases is NOT the case.

Why not create a wedding dessert buffet out of it? You can really get creative with this and with the help of your pastry chef, you two or three can come up with tasty, couture, devine and stylish to present as well. Yes, presentation is everything!

Caution! For clarification purposes, I’m not talking about your wedding reception’s location, full service, mediocre pastry stations, broken down by $2 to $7 per person fees either (two thumbs down).

What’s great about couture dessert buffets is that you’re treating your guests to an array of fine desserts in which they have never tasted or do not get to enjoy every day or whenever they want AND it is just better than plain old bulk bought candy…everybody has had a Jordan almond, chocolate covered pretzel, a Katy-did replica and more of the common candies before — be there done that! Absolutely boring…

Specialty pastries do cost more, but they are so worth it. These can be the alternative to useless wedding favors that are tossed in the garbage or left to collect dust after it’s served its purpose for a day. Send your guests home with a fresh, French tart covered with a pineapple concoction and may others to boot.

Today’s post was inspired by another blogger who’s blog I read often and this is her work. Check her out, Theresa H. Hall!

I know you’ve seen these on a lot of wedding blogs, but I’m going to talk about why you should use these and how you should go about obtaining these for your wedding ceremony. I wanted to post a better image of what I’m talking about (but I’d have to scan it from page 182 in the Martha Stewart Magazine Winter 2008), but I’m going to just use this one from The Knot as an example.

OK! These are called favor cones, but for this post I’m going to call them rose cones. Rose cones are for wedding guests to throw rose petals at the Bride and Groom as they exit the ceremony place. You can throw whatever you want (except for rice and plastics), but in my opinion, the classiest things to throw are rose petals. You can buy them buy the bag at your local florist’s shop.

You can have these cones made up for you by a professional or you can DIY = do it yourself. I try not to DIY because I am not good with crafts and such, but these seem simple enough even for me to do. Go figure. You can save some money and put it into other places inside of your budget like in the Photography bucket (we’ll talk about this one later)!

I found some pretty easy instructions on the DIY Network site that can help you to achieve the look you’re going for. You can purchase the paper and embellishments from your local papery store…not a problem. Although I hate to say this, Google It!

There are other ways and looks of doing rose favors like making rose bags or rose boxes. I seen a Knottie (in her Knot profile) who got really creative and used Chinese food boxes as throwers. I don’t like the Chinese food box or the rose bag ideas…*hmm…thinking about it again*…no, I still don’t like those ideas. Here is an example of a rose bag I borrowed from the Bliss Market website.

Rose Cones / Favors: Tip of the day!

I recommend throwing light colored rose petals, such as pink, because red can stain the carpets and floors inside of the ceremony. You can also stain the concrete outside of the church. Some churches don’t allow rose throwing for this reason or will bill you for the cleanup and who needs that drama?

Your alternative to throwing roses would be blowing bubbles (that could get ugly sometimes). I don’t recommend blowing bubbles because this is my blog (tee hee) and I don’t like it. Bubbles look good in pictures, if they are captured, but it’s not me.

**Please, do not throw rice or plastics like confetti. It’s bad for the environment and its wild creatures!