Beautiful Wedding Favors, with a New Twist on Ballotin Boxes!

These elegant wedding favors are great to fill with edible yummies or something usable (like one of my favorites, soap). These boxes are typically used by candy makers for truffles. But since I like to use things in non-traditional ways, I colored outside the lines on this one and put the soaps in it.

These can make a really cheap favor, and in fact you can get these ballotin boxes online in several colors, monogrammed even, for less than $1.00 per box! That sounds like the beginning of a nice, inexpensive favor idea to me! The trick is, of course, to look for them on candy or baking sites, NOT on wedding supply sites.

Just about any ribbon will look great tied on these boxes. Make your own crisp black & white labels on your laser printer, and bake delish cookies, buy truffles in bulk or buy a loaf of soap online and slice it into little guest-sized bars to fill your boxes.
In this example, I cut my soap into chunks, wrapped it in translucent deli paper, then put labels on the soaps and the box lid (see picture of the open box, below).

STEPS:
1) Purchase ballotin boxes. Try websites like www.bakingboxes.com that sell candy supplies.

2) Purchase your ribbon

3) Make your labeling decision - to buy pre-made or DIY. You can find pre-printed labels on the internet pretty easily. If you want to do your own, buy full-sheet adhesive backed paper and use a word-processing program to create a border and add your text. Cut and paste your text-box label multiple times on one document page, then print. Then, after printing them, use a rotary-type paper cutter to cleanly trim your labels.

4) Choose what you want to put in your elegant wedding favors. Cookies? Fudge? (mmm...) If you put edibles in, cut pieces of tissue, deli or waxed paper to put underneath and lay over the top of the treats. This is another opportunity to add color to the favor as well.

5) Assemble your gorgeous favors. See below this next picture for some seasonal variations...


TIPS:

Make it seasonal! For a spring wedding theme you can put small flower bulbs with a bit of moss, tulips for example, in your elegant wedding favors box. For summer, fill with swedish fish, and on the outside, stick a nice seashell on with hot glue, with your ribbon and label.

For a fall wedding, glue an acorn on top or collect pretty autumn leaves that have turned color, and slide one of these under a ribbon band. For the inside, make maple candy or sugar cookies with a maple-leaf shaped cookie cutter.

For a winter wedding, try unwrapped peppermint patties, junior mints or peppermint bark inside with a sprig of red berries and white ribbon on the out side.