Favors and Free Filigree

Hey Folks! So, I've been working on my favors sporadically over the last month or so. In order to keep my DIY from getting out of control, I'm sticking with my BRIDES brand color theme and purchased the coordinating pieces from Michael's using their in-store, on-line and bridal magazine coupons. It's saved me a ton of money thus far. But wait, I'm getting ahead of myself here....

I had a couple of ideas for favors and I'm still coming up with new ones, but The Candyman got his vote in early on, so I need to keep my eye on the ball and not get distracted (Oh look! Something shiny! What? Oh, right. Focus.) . Some of the first ideas color coordinated with my ivory, chocolate and sandalwood (bridal lingo for beige) color story. My first thought was to do pretzel rods dipped in milk, dark and white chocolate, placed in clear cellophane bags and tied with ribbon. I've done these before and they are a piece of cake (this has nothing to do with my cake baking trials, just so you know).

Photo courtesy of Dawn's Popcorn.

I also considered making my famous Chocolate Covered Cherries, but they are a pain in the ass to make and pack and I only make them every other year for Christmas because they are such an ass-ache. The do seriously rock. Seriously. I really don't understand how anyone can not like chocolate covered cherries. Seems like a crime almost, but there are people out there. Me? I can't wait until the day after Christmas when all the left-over boxes at Walgreen's go on sale, 2 boxes for a buck. Hell yeah.

Man, I digress easy. OK, so no pretzel rods, no cherries. CD's printed with our faces? Nah. I wanted it to be something a little special, but not hard to do. I didn't want M&M's with our faces on them. Or little plant your own tree branch things (you know people are just going to toss those suckers) or whatever little gay, throw away thing I could come up with. No. No. No.

I casually mentioned The Cookies to The Candyman and he was all for it. There was no further discussion, The Cookies won. The Cookies are from a recipe someone sent me claiming it was the Neiman Marcus urban-legend recipe. It is not that recipe. I've checked. It has similar ingredients, but it's not quite the same. At any rate, they are damn fine Cookies. I've given them as birthday gifts to several people and the response is always top notch.

The Cookies needed a gift package vehicle and I was trying to figure out what to do. Martha had her little cookie jar Idea of the Day, but those jars are not cheap. I looked over at a great resource called the Sunburst Bottle Company, but I couldn't find what I wanted there either. Back to Michael's I trudged (oh, who am I kidding, I freakin' love it there now). The cheapest packing I could find were 3" square little DIY boxes that match the card stock color of my invitations. Sweet! I had one 50% coupon and one 40% off coupon, so I dragged my mom with me over Easter and got two boxes of 50, which will be plenty. My mom bought one box of boxes for me, so that was cool!

Photo courtesy of Michael's.

I was able to fold most of the boxes together pretty quickly over a few evenings. Last weekend, I did a test run on a batch of cookies (I needed a cake-break) to see how many would fit and I can get 3 cookies in each box! I'm planning on lining the box with tissue paper too. I will need to enlist The Candyman to assemble these, hopefully without eating all the cookies! The boxes come with the ribbon shown in the picture, but you know I'm not going to settle for just that. I'm not sure how I'm going to do it quite yet, but I have this mocked up for a potential tag that I'll print on ivory card stock (sorry about the blur, trying to keep The Candyman sweet). I got the outline border from Martha's down-loadable monograms, edited out the monogram and added my own text to match my invitation font. I also changed the color to my R95 G42 B0 colorway.
I will include The Cookie recipe printed on ivory card stock that I can slip inside the box, on top of the tissue. I wanted to put my filigree-scroll pattern from my invitations on the recipe card but it looked kinda crappy, to be honest. I went on-line and Googled FREE FILIGREE CLIP ART and found this amazing website called FotoSearch (kinda sad I didn't find this prior to STD's and invites!). I grabbed a clip and modified it a bit and came up with this to match my font color:

I've put it at the top of my recipe card on the front and the back and it looks pretty cool! I've just got to print and cut everything. That is, unless I change my mind about all this. Thoughts?