Our Favors

I know there's a lot of debate about favors. Some people think they're unnecessary, and some people (like me) can't fathom not having them. 

Actually, I have lots of opinions on favors. I'm easily grossed out by homemade jams and similar cooked-at-home-and-packaged stuff, and I also hate donations (Not that I think giving a donation is a bad idea, just that I like to keep that stuff more private, rather than shoving my good deed in everyone's face). 

Okay, so with all my pickiness out in the open, here's what I chose, feel free to have your own say about it:

 

Champagne glasses! I used the monogram from our invitations, and Mr. B painstakingly centered our names and wedding date around the monogram. 

We ordered the glasses from Discountmugs.com , and I was really happy with them. They offer 10% discounts frequently, so we wound up paying about $360 for 200 glasses. Their shipping was fast, with nothing broken in transit, and the glass quality was very good.

The favors will be set out on a table at the end of the wedding, and I opted for a little DIY to jazz them up:

First, I made "thank you" tags:

These were really simple:
1.  Create a 3 colum by 7 row landscape table in Microsoft Word, sizing each cell to be 1" tall and 3" long. I made the table borders a very light gray so that I had guidelines for cutting them out.
2. Type your text- we just put "Thank you! Tracy and Brad" on them, in our wedding fonts of Edwardian Script and Garamond.
3. We printed them on Opal Stardream cardstock from Cards and Pockets, and cut them out (with a razor and straight edge, not scissors).
4. Mr. B punched a hole in the tags and I used the best corner rounder ever to make a 1/4" rounded corner on each tag.
5. Finally, I ran the edges through a gold ink pad so they'd match the gold edges on our invite (not that ANYONE will notice).

I promise you can have the tags finished in like an hour and a half.  I popped open a Sam Adams, got into the swing of things, and they were done before I knew it.

We attached the thank you tags with a sheer gold ribbon from Nashville Wraps, and stuffed them with french vanilla tissue paper shred, also from Nashville Wraps.

In an aside, Nashville Wraps is another company I have to really recommend. I paid $2.85 cents for 25 yards of ribbon (yes, you're reading that right), which was more than enough for 200 glasses. I paid only $6.85 for one pound of shred, again, more than enough for this project.

So for less than $10 we really added to the favors and made them look really nice, rather than just having a collection of glasses on the table.

And if you don't need shred or ribbon, they sell a humongous amount of gift bags, boxes, tissue paper, or any kind of packaging you could imagine, in all different colors and patterns, at wholesale prices. And no, they're not paying me to say this, I just think it is a really great resource for all of us crazy DIY brides!

What are you guys doing for favors? And do you get really opinionated about them too?

(all pics are personal, and terrible, sorry)