Wedding Craft #3: The Wedding Favors

We really tried to make this wedding as homemade and crafty as possible, so when it came to favors, I knew they had to be homemade, I just didn't know what. After seeing the trend of jars of honey or jam or pickled foods, I knew I wanted little jars of something as the favors. I've always wanted to make homemade jam, so I thought what better time? Now, there were exactly 235 jars of jam made - but I, personally, can only take credit for 21 of these. See, my mom really got into it. She would call me randomly and just let me know that she just made 51 jars of Kumquat jam... or 43 jars of fig. After she was almost done with most of the jam, I insisted on being there to help.

I joined her for making some cherry jam, which all started with pitting lots and lots of cherries.

We didn't really use a specific recipe, other than cherries, sugar, and pectin.

We made sure to sterilize the jars before filling them. We ended up with 21 jars of cherry jam. As I looked at my finished work, with stained red cherry hands, I then decided, if mom really wants to make the jam, I'm gonna let mom make the jam. And she did, and I think she had fun.

I did too... but with the 800 other things I had to do for this wedding, it was nice letting my mom have this one. Once all the jams were made, I wanted a little something extra for the tops of the jars, so I went out and found these gold foil award labels at Office Max. They were perfect for printing a little thank you and our silhouette.

As I screen printed all of our invites, I also created the screen to screen printed little fabric tops, with Brian and my silhouettes.

I also purchased little clear round labels to list the jam flavors; however, those just kept falling off the jars. After a while, we started loosing track of which flavors are which, so we gave that idea up quickly. Brian reminded me, "Annette, no one is going to leave our wedding angry because their jam jar has no flavor listed on it..." and I let it go. He was right, of course, I think people really liked the jam - especially when they found out it was homemade.

We finished the jam decor off by tying the fabric tops on using twine. Who knew twine was so hard to find??? It is! Well, cute twine is anyway... but we finally found a bunch of it and tied it on one by one, as we watched lots of tv. Brian was kind of a rock star at tying twine on jam.


Brian and I are now on the road, driving up to Seattle to see our dear friends Chris and Susana get married! We're so excited! When I get back home, I'll be blogging about a little wedding craft that I created especially for their wedding!

Up next: Chris & Susana's Wedding Craft