Weddingbee Blog

I’ve had my favors bought since our trip to Hong Kong in December/January, and I’m finally ready to share them with you! I started with this idea:

Martha Stewart Weddings Spring ‘o7

I was first introduced to blooming teas through Weddingbee Contests, which linked back to one of Mrs. Violet’s posts. Since our reception is a Chinese Banquet, I wanted our favors to match the theme. Drinking tea is strongly embedded in Chinese culture, as it can be used as a sign of respect or gratitude. So this idea worked perfectly!

While on our side trip to Shenzhen, China to buy my qipao and Mr. Toucan’s tuxedo, I kept my eyes peeled for tea shops (and there are LOTS of them), until we found this one:

Daddy Toucan had already bought some tea from them, and seriously became BEST FRIENDS with these tea shop ladies (I really wish I had a picture of Daddy Toucan and his best buds). Anyways, we worked out a pretty good deal for the blooming tea buds, along with these for containers:

Hurray!!! So, why did I take so long in actually showing you my favors? Well, it’s because I didn’t know how I wanted to hand out the favors, and the packaging for the tea cups tragically looks like this:

Our initial idea was just to take out all the tea cups from the boxes and simply place them on the tables with the tea balls. However, Mommy Toucan thought that we’d have more guests leave them on the table because there really isn’t a good way to carry a glass cup home. Sooo… back to square one. Others were trying to convince me that the box wasn’t that bad. After all, it did have this gem of a warning label that was awesomely translated into English:

Awesome warning label.

My absolute favorite warning:

“Crack is the reason for glass broken”

Finally, my solution - wrap the boxes!

I bought 2 rolls of gift wrap paper in my wedding colors from Paper Mart - the first is in Shimmer Frost Ruby, and the second is in Shimmer Frost Peacock. I wrapped the boxes, so that you can open the boxes without ripping the paper. This way, I won’t have to worry about lots of paper all over the floor of our reception room!

Inside wrapping (not as pretty as the outside, but it works)

Finally, I added a wrapped a piece of ribbon around it, and attached our monogram on top. Voila! A favor is made!

Ta-da!

1 down, 249 to go! (oy vey!) I’ve managed to make pretty good headway though:

I figure if I wrap 2-3 of the boxes a day, I should be in pretty good shape…
I think it worth it though:

The finished product looks a lot better than the original, doesn’t it?