Creative Inexpensive Wedding Favors

Classic Favorites

Candles and soap make elegant, yet useful favors. The trick is putting your own spin on them. For instance, make your own with easy melt-and-pour recipes available at most craft stores. Use molds to create shapes such as hearts, palm trees, sea shells, wedding bells, your initials, monogram or whatever shape fits your wedding. For candles, pour wax directly into interesting containers such as wine glasses or votive glass containers. Purchase them in bulk for larger savings, or find mismatched containers at thrift and dollar stores.

Put a personal touch on your favors. Give each guest a pouch including all of the dry ingredients for your favorite cocoa or cookies; also give them the recipe so they can make it later. Create a small booklet filled with your favorite love stories, quotes or poems. Even better, write your own love poems and make them into a small book. Your fiance can illustrate the books so it comes from both of you. Find something you and your fiance can both contribute to, using your own talents or your favorite hobbies together. Purchase or make little clay or ceramic figurines that you can paint yourself. This can turn into a terrific bonding experience for you and your fiance, your family, or your friends when you enlist their help.

Give your guests something they can actually use, while remembering your wedding. Key chains, bookmarks, wine stoppers, coasters, cookie cutters and measuring spoons are all options that can be found inexpensively. Add a creative tag such as "Cut Out for Love" on a cookie cutter along with your names and wedding date. Holiday ornaments can be purchased or decorated to match your theme, particularly if you're having a winter wedding. Small potpourri pouches are useful and elegant. Assign someone to snap Polaroid photos of each guest either when they come in or with the couple that they can take home as a keepsake.

Give your guests a small gift to represent your new life together. Small flower-shaped seed packages--the kind you can just plant the entire "disc"--are environmentally friendly while offering something soft and romantic as well. Provide small sachets with flower or citrus seedlings. Plant a small flower or seeds in a terra-cotta pot. Any of these ideas will work well if you add a personal touch with ribbon or your favor tags. Make your own tags using a computer, rubber stamp or stickers.