Truly Inexpensive Wedding Favor Ideas

 When I was planning my wedding, I google'd for cheap wedding favor ideas and always found the same type of products.  Yes, $3-5 is considered cheap but not when you're on a budget and wanting to invite as many of your friends and family without going broke trying to provide favors for everyone.  What I ended up doing for my guests was little boxes with hershey kisses and some confetti and a small framed photo of me and my husband.   The little boxes were wrapped with ribbons in our colors too.  We had about 50 guests and the total per guest was about $1.75.  We bought things on sale, clearence or in bulk to make it as cheap as possible without it really being "cheap". 

We had a whole year to plan, which gave us plenty of time to look and shop around before deciding.  The last couple weeks before the wedding everything was quickly tossed together and many revisions were made.  After the whole ordeal, I highly recommend eloping.  Not only is it stress free but very cheap as well! 

Depending on the size of your wedding and of course, your budget, theme and colors, the actual cost will vary. I chose to give a couple of different favors to my guests because I wanted them to have something to enjoy right away (the box of chocolates) but also something they could take home and display or enjoy (the picture).

Before we made our final decision, we looked at several different options:

* We were having an outdoor wedding so we looked at paper fans in our colors to help our guests stay cool. These ran at about $ .25 for the cheapest up to $2.50 for the nicer ones.

* We toyed with the idea of glass paper weights with our picture in them.

* We also looked at different styles of wedding bubbles.

Our main goal was to keep it as cheap as possible, but not give "cheap" quality favors.  The boxes we had for the candy were perchased on clearence at $5.00 for a box of 100 (we didn't use them all).  The Hershey kisses were found at Costco, and we got a huge bag for about $10 and used the whole thing.  The picture frames were found at the dollar store, we got 3 for a dollar and dressed them up with ribbon that matched the ribbon used on our invitations.  The pictures themselves were the most expensive part but we had them done in a wallet size at Walgreens and got 9 per sheet at about $4 a sheet.  We put them together in an afternoon and had everything ready to go the week before.  Before you go online or look through catelogs, make out your budget and be as realistic as possible.  Who wants to go into debt for favors and fancy napkins that will most likely be tossed aside and forgotten? 

 If you use Google to look up "wedding favor" under images, you'll get tons of ideas that you can alter to fit your theme/style and budget.  I saw some little trees in tiny pots with the couples' initials on them and some cute themed favor boxes.  Both of those could easily be recreated or help inspire you to make your own.  You don't necessarily need to pay big bucks to make your wedding special. 

Recruit the help of your bridesmaids or relatives and spend an afternoon putting everything together.  You'll have fun doing it, it will seem like less of a chore and you'll save a lot of money this way.  My whole family helped me with mine; even my little brother spent a couple of hours tying bows on the little bags of seed to toss and actually liked it. 

Before you go out and hire someone to make yours, or buy up a bunch of spendy favors, consider making your own to save money.  Just think, all that extra money you save on favors can be spent to make your honeymoon even more special!  Why trade those romantic memories for expensive favors?