Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Making the Cookie/Favor Bags...

These turned out to be a great project that I did in several stages. I liked the overall finished product, and changing my idea mid-stream ended up helping me tons in the end! Here’s what I did.

From the get-go we knew that we were not doing traditional favors. We knew that we would make a donation to the American Cancer Society, but wanting to give our guests something small to take home, we opted for homemade cookies. I shared that recipe with you here. And since I had SO many glassine bags left over from purchasing them for the rose petals project, I decided that those bags would make perfect cookie bags as well.

When I printed out our invitations several months ago (I think that it was August) a piece of what was printed at that time as our favor tag. I took some suggestions and ideas from the www and had our blurb explaining about our favor choice printed alongside our invitation items in order to get the most print out of my paper goods. Smart, huh? So those have been printed for a while now. While I had MOH here back in August helping me assemble the invitation suite, she also helped me cut those out and mount them on plain black cardstock. Even though they were printed on very pretty, sparkly Stardream paper...they lacked a little something when placed against a glassine bag. Mounting them on the black cardstock was a perfect solution...and since I had so much of it leftover too, it made perfect sense to use it here.

I left the stack of favor cards on the coffee table one day with instructions for B to punch holes in them all, pretty please. (This was like two weeks after they were all cut and mounted.)

Then they just sat there for two months. Hee hee.

Two weeks before the wedding, I spent a weekend baking all of our cookies for our favors. It was while I was doing that task when the brainstorm hit me. It was like a lightning bolt...and I had this idea: if you’re pre-making all the petal bags, closed at the top and open on the bottom to stuff the rose petals in at the last minute and then glue closed...why not do the same thing with the cookie bags?

Genius I tell you! I posted about the process in detail here, but didn't take any pictures...so here's the pictures. (Click back to the post for better instructions.)

This is what I started with:
See how the bottoms are closed already?
So I cut all the bottoms off... Folded them over...and cut out the part to glue them closed. (Sorry, no picture of that step!)

Then, I folded the tops of the bags down...
And used my bone folder to make the crease nice...And had B punch a hold in the center. Through that hole, I threaded a length of twin (used in our other projects also) and tied a knot just like I did for the escort cards/name tags. See how this is all “tying” together?!? Then pulling the twine through the other side, I simply tied a square knot to keep the bag closed.
I came across a post that Mrs. Beagle did on her cookie favors, worrying about whether the cookies would “grease” the insides of her bags, so I cut a small rectangle of freezer/butcher paper and inserted one into every bag. All of this was done BEFORE we were ready to put the cookies into the bags, so they were ready to go - just missing cookies and glue to close them!

The night before the wedding, after the cookies had spent all afternoon thawing, my Maids and I made two assembly lines with one person stuffing the cookies into the bags while another person glued them closed. Easy, peasy...We were literally done with all 140 bags in less than an hour. (Well, except for the last bag of cookies that got left in the freezer! But those were done lickety-split the next morning.)

Smart, huh? And they turned out SO cute! Here’s a picture of the final result for you...

Did you have an idea like that where you were able to “re-use” the idea over and over again? I had several...and I have to say that doing the rose petal bags and the cookies were a breeze this way the day before the wedding!

2 comments:

  1. how cute!! what was the saying on the bag? how was your wedding?? can't wait to see pics!! 11 more days till ours!!! ♥

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