Wedding Blog

Today our DIY rewind comes from Mrs. Corn. Just in time for the holidays, Mrs. Corn shows us how she created her coastal ornament favors for her wedding! This DIY project was originally posted on June 4th, 2007.

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When I first started thinking about favors, I knew I wanted to give something that would last rather than be eaten up in an instant like candy. I also didn’t want to give out something that would just take up room in people’s junk drawers until it was unceremoniously thrown out in a few months, years or decades.

I had seen some beautiful apothecary bottles with cork stops that were filled with sand and shells, and I thought that would be a really pretty thing to have at our wedding because they go with the coastal theme and they would also look nice on the tables and could add to the decor. However, the bottles were pretty expensive and I couldn’t really figure out what people would do with them once they got them home. It seemed a bit to tsotchke-esque for what we were going for.

About a week after Mr Corn and I were engaged, my roommate and I were in a Michael’s near where I used to live and we saw square glass ornaments on sale. They were 4 for $2.99! It dawned on me that I could still give our guests the sand and the sea like I wanted to, but instead of presenting them in the apothecary bottles that would just sit around the house, we could make ornaments for our guests to put on their trees at Christmas (if they feel like it)…

A couple of months ago, I discovered this site, CyberIslandShops, when I was flipping through my Coastal Living magazine. I was able to find shells tiny enough to fit into the opening of the ornament in bulk. I bought four bags for $9.99 each, but I only ended up using 1/2 of one bag, so I will reserve the rest for the centerpieces.

When I was filling the ornaments with sand, it became apparent that they became very heavy, very quickly, so I decided only to put a little bit of sand in and some of the shells. Of course, then the ornaments ended up looking a little skimpy, so I thought maybe I could put a piece of paper (that coordinates with the invitations) inside them with our monogram on the front and the date of our wedding on the back.

Getting the piece of paper in the ornament proved to be a bit of a challenge, but I finally figured it out. Once I got the paper in the ornament, I decided that since you can’t see the back of the paper that I might-as-well put the date on the front, along with the monogram. This also cut down on the number of pieces of paper that were glued to each other that I had to get into the ornament and then uncurl.

Anyway, I am sure I have bored you enough, so without further ado…here is the example ornament that I originally made to base all of the rest off of. You can see that there is a blue ribbon at the top to tie it with. The second picture shows the ornament sitting next to all of the paper pieces that I put together when I was preparing to making the rest of them. The final ornaments will also have different sand in them. I am going to use concrete mix because it looks more like beach sand than the craft sand that I used in the example and because you can buy an obscene amount of it (40lbs) at Home Depot for only $4.99.

Note… after making close to 1/2 of these, I decided I was working WAY too hard for each individual ornament for it to be unceremoniously be tossed away by any couples who are attending our wedding and would therefore go home with two of these. In a future post, I will show you what I did to ensure that every place setting still gets a favor (since they are part of the table decor) but couples go home with two things they can use…