cheap wedding favors

[OhioGrumpyGirl]

Does anyone have any ideas on cheap wedding favors, supplies, decorations, anything? I'm getting married in Feb and do not have a lot of chas to spend, but still want a nice wedding. We are thinking around 100 people. My uncle is a photographer so that's taken care of, his friend drives a limo so that's done, another friend does catering so we're getting somewhat of a deal on that. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!! (I didn't want to post on the wedding forum cuz it's not a Disney wedding!! Well, it's not taking place at Disney......the cake topper is the castle and little things like that, more of a Cinderella or fairy tale theme reception.)

 

[carrie_106]

I don't know when in February you are getting married, but I was married on the 25th, I used red as a color and bought a lot of Valentine candy, and misc. items to use at our wedding and no one even thought about V-day. Congratulations!

 

[Kate and Pete]

I might get flamed for this, but so be it...

You know, all those wedding favors that I've collected from the 100's of weddings I've been to (okay, maybe not 100's... ) have ended up in the garbage (well, except the almonds...). I had favors at my wedding (daisy seeds in a cute little box - we had a garden themed wedding and my flowers were daisies) and nobody has ever said, "You know, those daisy seeds I got at your wedding are really growing well!" For all I know, those got tossed, too!

Why don't you save take the money you would have spent on favors, and donate it to a favorite cause (if I had to do it over I'd donate to the local humane society) and then print up a little card on cardstock for each setting saying that a donation has been made in lieu of a favor...that way your money's going where it's needed, and not to the bottom of someone's junk drawer.

Going along with your Cinderella theme, what about donations to "Make a Wish"? There's your whole theme right there!

Good luck! Keep us posted - I love hearing about people planning their weddings! DH and I celebrated our fifth anniversary this year by going to WDW!

 

[Mickey527]

Kate and Pete,
that is one of the best ideas I have read in a long time. and donating to Make a Wish is great.
I just tossed out my son and DIL's favors for her shower and their wedding a few weeks ago along with tons of wedding doves, swans and other assorted knicknacks. Worthless junk that I don't need and couldn't even sell at a tag sale.
Of course the fact that my son is divorcing her and getting full custody of their son means nothing, I would have tossed it even if they were together.

 

[nannon16]

I'm with the last poster on making a donation instead of buying favors. For what it would have cost us to buy something little (that we know we have been tossed most likely anyway...) for our 150 guests, we made a nice donation to the Susan G Koman Breast Cancer society in my aunt's name. We put little cards on all the tables saying we had made the donation in lieu of favors. We felt it was a much better way of spending the money and a lot of people actually said at the wedding what a great idea it was.

If you do want to give an actual favor and are good with computers, an idea someone gave me that would have been relatively cheap was to make a CD of songs from the wedding. Blank CDs aren't that expensive and neither are labels nowadays. You can use the song from your first dance, entrance song if you have one, parent dances, song from the bouquet toss, etc and as well as any "fun" songs you're planning on having played at the wedding. If you don't have all the music yourself, I'm sure if you ask around you can probably find people who do have it and borrow the CDs. Then just print labels with your names and the date (and possibly a picture). Then your guests can listen to it later and always have a way to remember the fun time they had at your wedding!

 

[LadyyRedd]

I have to agree....almost every favor I've ever gotten at a wedding has gotten tossed aside. I would NOT be at all offended if I went to a wedding and it didnt' have favors. The only ones I've ever used that were given at a wedding were candy. I like the after dinner mints and put those in my purse for later. At another wedding or two, we were hungry, so we went ahead and ate the candy when we first sat at the table.

Although, I do like the CD idea and as long as the music was to my taste, I'd use that.

But overall, I'd say skip the favors and use it towards something else.

Kimya

 

[pubugg]

Being a volunteer with Make-A-Wish, and in line with the Cinderella theme, I wholeheartedly support that donation . With all the weddings I've been to, the only favor I've really found of use is the matches. Now, if you want something edible, what about iced butter cookies. My mom works for a bakery and that is becoming the trend. Really good cookies cut into whatever shape is appropriate (football coach got married so they were footballs, so perhaps a shoe??), iced and then the couples monogram tops it. If wanting to save some additional money, the bakery could do the cookies and you could do the monogram. Then, just place them in individual bags (bakery may even be able to sell you some at a discount) and you could seal them with a sticker.

If you need centerpieces, what about something that someone at the table could "win" (special sticker under plate, that type of thing) and then they take them home....perhaps a potted flower??

 

[becalubob]

How about magnets? My husband and I made our own for really cheap- I think we got the magnets and the sticky paper from Office Max? We had them say different things like, "I went to Dean and Becky's wedding and all I got was this lousy magnet" or "I survived Dean and Becky's wedding" and then the date - there was even room on some for a picture/ border. I'm sure not everyone has kept theirs, but we still have ours on our fridge, as well as our good friends and some close family members. Everyone got a kick out of them and who can't use a fridge magnet?

I also like the donation to Make A Wish idea!

Good luck and congratulations!!!

 

[CEDmom]

We got mini boxes of chocolate from a local shop but you could do the same thing yourself. Buy a bunch of Dove Promises (watch for sales) and put either in pretty bags or boxes. Tie with ribbon that matches your colors. You could even look at getting your names and wedding date printed on the ribbon or print it yourself on pretty stickers and put on bags or boxes.

 

[nicolita3]

For one of the favors we did was some candy heartshaped dishes I had found at the dollar store 4 for $1 and I filled them with m&ms but you could fill them with any candy.

 

[ericamcl]

check out oriental trading company...they have a lot of "neat" little things really cheap that you can use.
a friend of mine got married in march and she got little "boxes" from there and then had a "candy bar" where each guest could fill their box with candy from the bar. she got all of the candy at sam's club and had less than $50.00 invested in the whole thing. she had about 125 guests i think

 

[bellarella]

I agree with no favors, however, I do find the "a donation in lieu of favors" note always strikes me as tacky. It misses the point of both favors and charity as far as I'm concerned.

We didn't do proper favors at our wedding. Instead I found several verses on love and friendship that my DH and I enjoyed and printed them on parchment paper and tied them into little scrolls with a ribbon of of our wedding color. I also didn't do flowers on the table. They weren't in our budget. I bought floating candles and used the hotel's vase and mirror and tied ribbon around the rim of the vase had the floating candle in it and that placed on the mirror and put potpourri on the mirror. It was an elegant look and cost very little.

 

[gris gris]

Here's what I did - it was cheap, but took a lot of time. But it was GREAT.

I bought cheap picture frames at the Christmas Tree Shop ($2.00 each) and then I filled each frame with a picture of the person coming to the wedding. They doubled as place cards. So, people arrived to our wedding and at their tables were old pictures of themselves. Lucky for me & DH we had a picture of almost everyone. It was so fun.......some pictures were even from the guests' weddings. Some were old pictures, some were new, but everyone had one and to this day I still get comments about how fun it was. And, people still have them on display in their homes. It took a lot of work but all worth it in the end.

 

[THpoohbear]

I bought bulk bags of Hershey minis, along with tulle circles in my wedding color online during a sale. Then in Word I designed a candy "wrap". I cut the pages and wrapped a piece of paper around each candy and stuck it together with double sided tape. It's positioned so there are hearts on the top of the candy with our names, a bible verse on the back, one side has the date and the other side has a thanks message. Each piece of printer paper produced several wraps, and I printed it out in my colors. I put three wrapped candies in a tulle circle and tied it together with ribbon. Very cheap, and it was edible. Nothing for guests to keep, but it sure made the tables pretty. =)

 

[deedeecee]

How about candy bar favors? It can be pretty pricey to order them, but not too difficult to make. We just printed our wedding info on glossy paper and wrapped it around a candy bar. (As I recall, KitKat bars were the only candy bars at the time that had inner wrappers of foil surrounded by outer wrappers of paper. We took the outer wrapper off and replaced it with our creation.) It was actually quite cute. We included the graphic that we used on our wedding invites. You could include a bride and groom Minnie and Mickey.

Also, we included framed pictures of ourselves when we were young as part of the table centerpieces. People seemed to enjoy looking at the pictures (different pictures at each table) and best of all, it was free!

Good luck with your wedding planning.

 

[deedeecee]

I see that Thpoohbear posted first about the candy wrap. Great minds must think alike.

 

[mrsklamc]

We didn't have favors, period. We might have done a donation if it had occurred to us.
I did see plastic spoons once, with a hershey's 'hug' (do they still make those?) and kiss placed bottom to bottom in the 'bowl' part of the spoon. They were wrapped in tulle and had tags that said 'A spoonful of hugs and a spoonful of kisses, ____ and ____ are now Mr. and Mrs!'
A friend had an idea I thought was great- she picked out chargers she would have wanted anyway and used them to build the centerpieces on. Then when she was done, instead of useless centerpiece stuff she had chargers.
We bought boxes of mirrored tile from Home Depot and placed ivy bowls, which the church had, in the middle of them. Then we floated red roses on top of that.
The expensive part was the tablecloths- we had black tablecloths with rose petals sprinkled on top and then topped with a sheer silver cloth.
We were lucky in that the church didn't need a lot of decoration. I think we just put roses in a vase on the grand piano, and floated candles in more of the same ivy bowls around the base of the stage. Just be careful, because my DS fluffed my cathedral length train over one of the candles and started me on fire!
The florist was a friend and advised we order flowers from wal-mart.com or costco. She ended up getting us a better deal from a supplier, but it's a budget source I hadn't considered at the time.

 

[mrsklamc]

We were going to make wedding invitations, but I found out I could buy them cheaper at rexcraft.com

I put a LOT of effort into making my wedding as inexpensive as possible, so sorry if I'm babbling... I should figure out how to post pics..

Also, it wasn't a necessity, but it was kind of a nice touch... we bought an aisle runner at hobby lobby for around $20....and we stocked up on white twinkle lights on after-Christmas clearance.

 

[mrsmom]

My neice had little chinese boxes and put colored M&Ms in them.
really cute.
Kim

 

[crjack]

Two ideas come to mind and both have been discussed. For the charity donation, which I whole heartedly support, I live in Boston and I know that Dana Farber Cancer Institute offers a nice scroll to be used as a favor that tells your guest you have chosen to have them benefit from an offering in lieu of favors. They are lovely and you can see them on their website. I truly wish they were available years ago when I got married. I'm sure other organizations have something similar.

The other option, goes along with the nice picture frame. Christmas Tree shop and others typically have nice, 2x3 frames for a reasonable cost. If you are having a seating plan (assigned seats with a table #) you can use business card perf. sheets that you get at an office supply store and put those in the nice frame. Lay them out on a table for your guests to know their seating info and they get a cute frame to take home. (They are a great size for extra school photos)

Good luck and congratulations.