It’s one of the most commonly asked questions here at Go Wedding Favours, so we thought we would help with this burning question – leaving you to focus on another one of the hundreds of last minute tasks and chores.
First things first, don’t leave your wedding favours till the last minute, you’ll have less time to think about your options and you won’t be happy unless you know you’ve got it absolutely right!
Whether going for organza bags or favour boxes the obvious place to start is by counting the number of confirmed and unconfirmed but likely to confirm guests. Then add 10% because you never know how many people you’ve forgotten to put on the guest list and anyway if going down the DIY favour box route, you WILL make some mistakes! We all do that’s just human nature.
Next work out how many boxes you have and then work out the area of the base of each box. This is done by multiplying the width and the height and will be an important indicator of how much tissue paper to buy. For example if your box is 25cm2 then you will need 50cm2 of tissue paper because if you double the box base area then you can build a tissue paper nest inside the box that will pretty much be the perfect amount. Now say you have 100 favour boxes at 25cm2 each then you multiply 25 x 100 = 2500cm2 or 2.5m2. You can now buy enough tissue paper to do each box and not have any waste left over.
Now whether you are buying sugared almonds or chocolate dragees you should buy them in 1kg packs to get value for money. The number you use depends upon the size of your chosen box but as a general rule 5 sweets is symbolic and make a nice number for each guest. Now each sugared almond and chocolate dragee box contains approximately 240-250 sweets, unless you choose small chocolate dragee hearts, but that’s for another day. Say you now have your 100 boxes made and lined with tissue paper, using the 5 rule you need to supply 5 x 100 sweets, so 500 sweets. Now divide 500 by the number of sweets in each box 500 / 250 = 2. Therefore you will need 2 boxes of sugared almonds or chocolate dragees. However the approximate amounts are the upper estimate of approximate and we would recommend buying 3 boxes to be on the safe side.
Next comes the ribbon, for a simple bow design on a square 5cm box we would recommend using 40cm of ribbon. Therefore if your box is square multiply the base of the box by 8 the reach the total length of ribbon required. Going back to our 100 boxes this would be 5cm x 8 = 40cm per box x 100 for all the boxes = 4000cm or 40m of ribbon. It would be wise to add a further 10% to the length if you are not a regular craft type person.
Finally, if you are having any, embellishments are easy because you generally buy 1 per box unless they are really small then it’s a case of catering for your own design.
We hope you found this article useful and wish you the best of luck with your wedding plans.
