Since my wedding was really a destination wedding (I don’t know anyone that came that was actually from Cashiers, NC!) and most of the guests were staying at High Hampton, I decided to give each guest an in-room favor instead of favors at the actual ceremony.
When planning the favors, we decided we wanted everything to be consumable, so that guests could enjoy them throughout the wedding weekend. After lots of ideas were thrown out we decided to include a jar of honey (fewer that three ounces to make sure people could take them on the plane!), biscuits, apples and a bottle of wine. We felt this mixture had a Southern feel and was seasonally appropriate.
The next step was to slowly, but surely, start organizing the pieces. First I reached out to The Bradford Store, which is a Huntersville, NC gem that sells all sorts of local produce, baked goods, etc. to see if they sold honey in small jars. The wonderful owner said she’d check with her honey man and get back to me. She came back with good news and bad news. The bad news was that her honey man didn’t have honey in small jars. Boo. But! The good news was that if I could get jars that he could run through his machine, he’d fill them up for me! Yea! So, I found jars at Specialty Bottle (they had several options to choose from) and got them over to the honey man. He filled them and got them back to me in no time, which just let the decorating part. Brian and I made cute labels to put on the jars and decided to use the scrap fabric from the table runners my mom made (amazing, right?!) to tie (with extra baker’s twine from my invitation – more on those later!) onto the lids.
{guest photo}
Here they are at the reception – we had extras, so we set them up in case anyone wanted more than one!
The biscuits, while sounding perfect in theory, ended up being not-so-perfect in reality since they only are really good right out of the oven (and maybe for a little while afterwards). Since we were going to put the baskets together the day before most people got to the wedding, we wanted something that would be yummy for at least a day or two. The genius chef at High Hampton suggested cornbread muffins, which were perfect and yummy all weekend long!
So, we put the honey, cornbread, and apples (also from the Bradford Store) into a gable box that we labeled with these amazing strips our stationer made for us for our invitations (but that we decided to use here instead!).
These were about 1″ high and 7″ long, with a bend at the dashed line above. We put them so they folded around two sides of the box: the Natalie and Brian part on the short part of the box and the Lodge part on the long side of the box.
We put the box in the room with a bottle of wine (we made little tags that looked similar to the labels above to go around the neck of the wine bottles). I wish I had a picture of the completed favor box, but I was too preoccupied putting them together to actually take one!
What are you thinking of doing for your favors? I have to say, these took a lot of thought and time, but I really loved the end result and I think the guests liked the little surprise in their rooms!