Under the Harvest Moon: Some Last Minute Projects

I went to Texas a little over a week before the wedding to take care of last minute things, visit with family and give my Mom a chance to work on the dress while seeing it on me.

One of those projects was our favors.  I had a grand scheme of having recipes for all the homemade desserts we'd be serving, but that ended up excluding too many of Mr. Moonbeam's family recipes.  His family had to travel in, which made it harder to bring a dessert, and a lot of his (and my) family favorites were savory dishes.  So, we ended up with general family recipe favors and a lot of homemade desserts.  They weren't totally coordinated, but there was some crossover.

Like other bees before me (apple cider, cowboy boot), I got my hands on some muslin bags and stamped them with our custom stamp.  Make sure to use fabric ink for the stamping (I believe it's the kind that says 'permanent dye').

I gathered most of the recipes by email, but with some of the older folks it was just easier to get it on paper or over the phone.  The method of selection for inclusion in the favors was devised to be as fair as possible.  If you actually responded to my email and sent any recipe(s) one of your recipes got in the favor bag.  Then I did a little personal hunting/asking to make sure I had equal numbers of recipes from each side of the family.

Unfortunately I couldn't work on these in LA as planned, because my laptop died about a month before the wedding.  Luckily Momma MB was buying us new laptops for Christmas and when I arrived in San Antonio there was a new laptop waiting for me to load it with Adobe programs that I missed desperately.  Then it was a mad dash of laying out recipes, finding a printer that worked (there were 2 at my Mom's house that refused to work properly, so I had my sister bring over her new one), cutting out the cards (super easy since I took them to a copy shop) and stuffing them into the bags I stamped in LA.

I laid them out, 4 to a page, and printed the covers on cream cardstock.  Then I printed the recipes on white cardstock.  The main reason for doing this was the varied amounts of leftover cardstock I had on hand, but it ended up defining the cover, since the weight of the paper was the same.

Outsource the cutting, it's cheap and saves your sanity.

I had 160-ish people at my wedding, and I gave up after making 80 favors.  I put a little sign in front of them that asked guests to take 1 per household, but I heard that some cousins lost their favors when they left their table to go outside for a bit.  Seattle 'maid told me later that she had enlisted a friend to stash her favor in her purse so that no stealing would occur.  I suppose I should have made more, but at least I didn't end up with a lot of leftovers.

One of my all time favorite family recipes, and of course I forgot to have my Grandma make some for the wedding, but I'll share it with y'all instead.  (Oh, and if you put marshmallows on the hot cake and then pour on the hot icing, when you spread it around they sort of melt and mix in and make some amazing gooey heaven in your mouth.)