7 Ideas for more Eco-friendly Wedding Table Favours

Wedding favours, those cute little gifts at the table when you sit down to eat after mingling with a few glasses of fizz.

When I talk to friends or clients about their weddings, the wedding favours chat does sometimes bring on an eye roll. It’s not surprising, because when it comes to wedding favours, they really can add up. It can be easy for them to take up the budget, cause stress if they’re left to the last minute and they can use a lot of cellophane wrapping. But, this doesn’t need to be the case.

They can be a very special way of saying thank you to your favourite people when they’ve come to celebrate your wedding day with you. Remember that joy that came with being given a party bag at the end of a big session of musical statues at your friends birthday when you were 7? You can recreate that feeling for all those people sitting down to make new friends round the tables at your wedding day.

To give your guests a little thank you for coming to your day, without breaking the budget or using lots of single use plastic wrapping, here are 7 more eco-friendly table favour ideas…

1. A modern Mix Tape.

Head up to the attic for that box of discarded cassette tapes or go on a charity shop or second hand shopping spree for old cassette tapes. I managed to find some Pride and Prejudice audio book tapes in the charity shop Shelter in Brighton. There are also lots of bundles of second hand tapes on ebay too. Now, here comes the really fun part. Put together your wedding playlist on Spotify of all your favourites and ones that will be played on the dance floor. Save the link to that playlist and make it into a QR code. There are tutorials online that show you how to make a QR code that takes you directly to a link. Get this QR code printed on stickers and place these onto the cassette tapes with a set of instructions like ‘Scan for Our Wedding Mixtape.’ (I’ve illustrated the QR code in the photo but it needs to be printed to be scanned by a phone camera).

A retro wedding mixtape with a nostalgic throwback to the good old days of winding up cassette tapes

2. Seeds.

To encourage your guests to plant their seeds you could use seeds like pumpkin, marrow or sunflowers and start a growing competition amongst your friends and family. Guests can catch up with each other and post their photos with a hashtag so everyone can see each other’s growing progress. To save money, you can buy a much larger bag and then decanter them into little seed pouches or envelopes for each guest. Then place a sticker on the seed pouch with a little set of instructions, your names and the date of your wedding on, (with the seed growing competition info included on there too). If you’ve used locally grown flowers for your wedding decorations, you could use some seeds from those varieties to make them even more connected with your wedding day. There are lots of Etsy shops who sell customised recyclable stickers or stamps, or you could make or stamp your own.

Creating a growing competition will encourage the seeds to be planted and keep your guests in touch with each other afterwards, when they watch each other’s plant growing progress.

3. Calligraphy.

If you have beautiful handwriting, or have always wanted to take a calligraphy class, then this is the perfect opportunity to flourish that quill! Turn your place names into beautiful calligraphy works of art that your guests can save as a little keepsake. The design options are endless, and this is a great chance to link your place names with your decor. If you’ve gone classic and chic, keep the place names that way too, or if you’ve gone botanical and leafy in your venue, include little leafy illustrations with your place names.

4. Postcards.

Gather together postcards connected to where you and your partner are getting married, where you both live, or where you’re both from. Then take a couple of evenings to write a personal thank you message to each of your guests on the back. Make them laugh, remind them of a memory you share or simply say how glad you are that they’ve come to your wedding.

5. Bottles of Flowers.

Get your wedding flowers to work twice as hard for you. Use bottles filled with flowers to decorate the centre of your wedding tables and put a little note at each person’s place to say, ‘at the end of the night, please take a bottle of flowers home with you‘. This is particularly handy if you’re heading off on honeymoon after your wedding because it means all your wedding flowers won’t go to waste.

I collect these glass bottles whenever I pop into a charity shop and spot them on the shelves.

6. Gifts in Jars.

If you’re already very skilled in the kitchen department when it comes to jams and chutneys, you can go ahead and make your own little pot for each guest. Or if you’ve always wanted to explore the jarring part of the culinary word then you and a pal could take a weekend workshop to learn how. You could also learn how to make your own natural soaps, spice mixes, or bath salts in little jars too.

7. Tree Ornaments.

Use a little wooden or clay shape with a simple stamp of your names and wedding date. You could use ribbon that links through with your wedding day colour palette, and connect the look of the favours on the tables to your wedding day decor. These can have a special place in the Christmas decoration box of each of your guests and be tied on their Christmas tree each year as a lovely memory of your wedding day.

I think you’ll agree, when you’ve got a wedding day to plan, time is your precious resource. So the main thing to remember, when making your wedding favours, is to make them well in advance. But also don’t forget them in their box when you’re going to set up your wedding tables! You can make a special event out of putting them together. If you have particularly creative friends, invite them over for a craft party with lots of drinks and snacks to keep you fuelled. The main aim of the wedding favour is a gesture of thanks, rather than ticking a box on the wedding to do list.

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