wedding week: diy favors.

so in case you missed it, pretty much our entire wedding was diy, with just a few exceptions. so when it came time to thinking about what kind of wedding favors to pass out to our guests {or if we even wanted to give out favors at all} we knew it had to be a few things.

whatever favors we were to give out needed to be inexpensive. obviously weddings cost A LOT. and nobody goes to a wedding and says "hey, the food was crappy, but how thoughtful that they gave us these engraved crystal paperweights shaped like the bride and groom's faces!" no. there are more important things to spend money on.

we knew our favors needed to be relatively easy. because weddings are stressful. and who cares if your bride and groom shaped crystal paperweights mimic the brides hairstyle perfectly if she goes completely mental from the stress of them and shaves all her hair off britney spears style before the wedding. then they wouldn't mimic her hairstyle perfectly and they'd have to be remade. and that's just going to add more stress. it's a vicious cycle.

and we also knew our favors needed to be meaningful. because that's the point of favors. they say "thank you for coming to our big day, it meant so much to us that you could be here. please take this special gift we picked out to remember our time together tonight on the dance floor dancing like maniacs to justin timberlake's sexy back." and if that special gift is a crystal paperweight in the bride and groom's likeness, it could potentially shatter into a million pieces on the dance floor. and that's some symbolism you don't need at your wedding.

so whilst carefully considering koozies, pens, wildflower seeds and other seen-it-done-before wedding favors, my dear mother half-jokingly suggests we could make some of her famously delicious strawberry jam for all our guests. it could be sweet {figuratively and literally}, relatively easy, and add a little bit of virginia to our tennessee wedding.

sold. and i think mom instantly regretted the suggestion. but me being her favorite daughter and all, she couldn't possibly say no to me. at least not in regards to creating my perfect wedding day.

so we took a short drive to scott's strawberry farm where we get our strawberries for jam.

and we searched the entire state for enough jam jars for all our guests.

and we were up to our eyeballs in strawberries.

i may or may not have eaten myself sick off strawberries.

but once we got them all washed off we got to cooking.

mom was a trooper and we had quite the effective little assembly line going.

and what we ended up with was around 175 jars of deliciousness.

each jar was then wrapped with some twine and got a little tag tied on.

the text on our wedding invitations read "love is meant to be shared." our reply cards read "share the love." and to keep the theme going our jam tags read "spread the love." get it? jam? spread the love? because it's jam... and you spread it... right. anyway.

the back of the little tags had a little story about the jam. it read, "thanks for sharing in our big day!this strawberry jam was homemade by the bride and her mother from strawberries handpicked at scott's strawberry farm in moneta, virginia."

it meant a lot to me to be able to have favors that were different from the standard things you see at weddings, it was something mom and i got to do together, and it brought a bit of my home state to our tennessee wedding. i can't think of anything else that would have been more perfect for us.

a big thank you to my momma for suggesting such an awesome idea. oh yeah and for making all of it, too.

also, just for fun. sexy back, wedding style. getyoursexyon.