Working on the (Wedding) Chain Gang

Wedding favours are one of the lovely traditions we wanted to roll into our wedding and finding a memento that was fun, and wouldn't end up in a land fill became the challenge du jour. Despite my sentimental tendencies, I wasn't interested in something that was too fru-fru or wrapped in lace or drenched in the stench of some fake scent or gooey poetry. I began trawling the interwebs in search of inspiration, when lo and behold, I stumbled upon the M&M website and discovered that we could not only PERSONALIZE our M&M's but we could put our wee PHOTO on the candies!! And essentially, if we sent an arm and a leg to the M&M people in the states, they would send us bags filled with these:

(Though we did have it shipped to Paul and Lisa's in Seattle as it was difficult to get the candies sent to us in Canada without severing a SECOND set of limbs!!) We budgeted for about 10 pounds of the stuff, and, as we had about 100 bags to make (for the 75 guests and a handful of friends and family who couldn't make the trip), we knew we'd have to supplement the personalized candies with some generic ones. So I bought some black M&M's in Vancouver to bring back with us, and some red and black lollipops. And then we sealed the deal with traditional Newfoundland candies, Purity Kisses. So indeed, our little wedding favours were sealed with a kiss from each of us.

Then we made a template bag to see how it would look.

And this involved some math. So we called in the big guns (sister-in-law Michele who is a scientist)

Each bag was comprised of a carefully measured scoop of personalized M&M's, 2 kisses, 1 lollipop and a smidge of black M&M's. Here's our chain gang now. (I was in the kitchen baking the first of the wedding cakes which were bound for the freezer until the baking of the caking, but I can say that we laughed, listened to music, and perhaps consumed a beverage or two!)

It wasn't long before the dining room table was a sea of wedding favour bags.

And we were one step closer to the festivities. (Lara tied most of the bags, but I snapped this photo while the patient was resting....)