To DIY or Not to DIY: Favors

For some reason, our idea for favors came relatively early on in the wedding planning process and as soon as we figured it out we couldn't walk away from it! I'm a HUGE proponent of favors that make sense. If we didn't figure out a favor that made sense, and emulated us as a couple then we probably would've scrapped them all together. Here's the thing about favors (and here I go with lists again):

1) They aren't absolutely essential. Honestly, 50% of the time I go to weddings I will completely forget to take a favor, either on purpose or unintentionally. For something you're buying with the expectation that every one of your guests will take a favor, those statistics are not in your favor and that will also eat up cash monies!

2) If you want people to take them, make them useful. And here's where I'm gonna get opinionated...When I'm a wedding guest, I'm not going to take a plastic container of bubbles with curly ribbon on it, or a handful of almonds packed in a tulle, or a tiny picture frame with your faces in it and date. It may be cute and sentimental but it's clutter in my eyes. Your guests want something they can use and not clutter their house.

3) Make it YOU! Favors should say something about the two of you! If you're just having favors because it's "protocol" see number 1.

At first, (again I was super DIY advantageous in the beginning) I wanted to make homemade salsa and can them in cute mason jars. I can't cook super well, but I can make a mean Chili's-taste-alike salsa. Chili's was our go-to restaurant while we were dating so I thought it was perfect! And it would've been, except the logistics, time involved in preparation, transportation, etc started making my idea more complicated. Not to mention, it also didn't really go with my theme or the Italian food we were serving. So we scrapped the salsa and went back to the drawing board.

We went with cotton candy--something we both love, and let's face it everyone loves some cotton candy every once and awhile!

Supplies

150 1.0 oz Cotton Candy in Pink from Flosszone.com

Kraft Brown Stickers from Staples

Umm and that's it!

Now if you go to the FlossZone website, it looks super sketchy. I originally wasn't going to use them just based off of their stuck in the 90's website with flashy background. However, there weren't many others that shipped out cotton candy in bulk in clear packages, so I was limited. You had your standard carnival type, but that was way too big for what we were using them for. I even emailed them some questions, and they got back to me quickly. I had these arrive a few weeks before the wedding. I splurged and bought the Kraft brown stickers instead of the standard white and designed the sticker to match our invitations/theme in Adobe. They were that easy. We ordered 150 (we had 160 guests) because knew not everyone would take one. Grandma would probably not like any cotton candy. And yes, I'm sure there are some other  crazy people who don't like the goodness of cotton candy. We STILL had leftovers-- I would say we had about 25-30 leftover. 

What we came up with was one of the easiest to prep, was SO us, matched our color palette, and it cost about $0.80 per person. Not to mention we ate a LOT of those leftovers :)