Wedding Blog

[Bird Shipping Tags with Twine]

I love shipping tags!

I first saw shipping tags used as price tags on some of my early antique purchases for wedding decor. They immediately struck me as pretty, shabby-chic and insanely appropriate for wedding ambiance. I decided to use them somehow.

My first idea was making tags into place/escort cards for everyone. In my vision, they were either laid out on a table in rows, or tied to wine glasses to help guests keep their glass as well as find their seat.

But the place card idea was quickly shoved under the rug for the amount of work that went into it as a last-minute project:

First, both Mr. Cherry Pie and I have crappy handwriting and are short on good-handwriting resources, so freehand tags were out. I considered printing tags, but that left me running sheets of cardstock through my company’s laser printer and hand-cutting/hole-punching each tag individually. That idea wasn’t so bad, but it sort of turned me off. Plus, wouldn’t you know it, they just don’t seem to make hole reinforcements in colors other than white or clear! Argh. So much for replicating the tag look on our own. (Yeah yeah, I know I could cheat by printing a circle and punching through it to get the same look.)

It’s true, we COULD have done it, but by that time we’d come up with the idea of using river rocks from Glacier as “escort cards” and assigned the task to Mr. CP’s dad.

I still wanted to use tags somehow, and when we decided on giving Polebridge cookies in clear plastic baggies as our favors, we decided to incorporate the shipping tags as favor tags.

By this time, I knew where to find the tags we wanted, to avoid having to cut, trim, and punch our own. Avery makes a variety of manila shipping tags, which you can buy 100 at Office Max for $4.99. We picked up the 2-3/4′ by 1-3/8′ tags because the next larger size was clumsily big.

I found a distressed, coffee-stained version of these tags on etsy today while looking for images:

[ Coffee Stained Shipping Tags on Etsy ]

How cool are those?I had also figured out how to overcome my printing problem with the help of a creative friend… rubber stamps!

I ordered a custom art mount stamp with our names, the dahlia from our invites, and our wedding date, from Simon Stamps. A 1-inch by 2-inch stamp was only $10 and arrived less than a week later!

Unfortunately, I had overestimated the stamp-cutting machine’s ability to pick up detail and the white lines spacing the petals of the dahlia were almost all invisible, leaving us with a poinsettia-shaped flower blob. It was totally my bad for not fixing the design.

I could probably have contacted Simon and asked them to fix my order. But honestly, I was feeling lazy… and when I went to Paper Source the next day I found a simple, rustic, and to-the-point “thanks” stamp that did just the trick.

I laid out all my favor tags on the floor and went to town with the stamp:

It was really, really soothing. Check out how zen they all look and how closely the ink (Sienna by Ancient Page) matches the hole reinforcement on the tags:

They even come with nifty little tie-tags, which we may or may not use.

Honestly, it’s not a perfect project, but it was rather spur-of-the moment. Once I realized I could do it, I bought everything and had it finished that same night in less than an hour. The whole thing only cost us $20… and it would have cost us only $10 if I hadn’t messed up the custom stamp.

So there you have it, some random DIY favor tags on the cheap.

What are you hanging/stamping/sticking on your favors, if anything?