Harvest Festival Favours

Today I'd like to share with you the wedding favours I recently made for friends. And I'm going to submit them for the October Berkhamsted Creative Challenge, as they fit the theme of Harvest festival - Time of Plenty, with their Autumnal colours and edible filling.

Let's start with the samples I made for Becci and James to choose from.

The box in front is based on the meadow from my walled garden piece. They all use the dragonfly stamps, from Sheena Douglass.

The design they chose is a mixture of the two jars shown behind.

There are different parts that came together to make these favours. Let's look at the lids first. (The jars are the 110ml hexagonal glass jars from Hobbycraft.)

I painted the gold lids with white gesso, then decoupaged them with a decopatch paper.

The dragonflies are the larger stamp in the set. I stamped with versa mark onto heat proof acetate, heat embossed in gold and cut out with scissors.

For the flowers, I used a sheet of double sided adhesive. I attached it first onto the wrong side of gold paper (so the reverse is gold).

I then peeled off the other backing, and started adding to the sticky surface. First came gilding flakes, dotted across. Then glitter in bronze, gold and brown shades, including some tinselly pieces. I dusted gold shades of mica into some areas, then finished with gold and platinum embossing powder in the gaps, which I heated to set.

This is the first sheet I made:

And here's the second version, with more gilding flake and less mica. (It's also bigger.)

I love the texture this creates! It's fun too, basically you throw everything you have at the sheet.

I then die cut flower shapes from the sheets and layered up to form 3D flowers. I attached these to the lids, and the dragonflies to the flowers, using a glue gun.

On the jars themselves, I heat embossed the couples initials, R and J (Becci was Rebecca for this). I didn't know if heat embossing onto glass would work, but had a go, and it did. It just takes a long time to turn, as the glass absorbs more heat than card, and then takes a while to cool again.

The next step was the mini envelopes. These were cut from parchment using a punch, then embossed using the Groovi system. I added the fold lines, the names of the guests (the favours became place settings as well) and a twirly flourish.

To colour them, I sprayed them with gold paint from behind.

Inside, they each had a personalised printed message, which I edged with a brown sharpie pen to finish them off.

I pierced the corner of each envelope, and made a ring from wire to feed through to attach them.

I threaded the envelopes onto organza ribbon, along with a selection of beads, and feathers (I wired these with a spiral round the "stalk" and a loop, to be able to thread them on).

The ribbon was wrapped around the jar, with the knot hidden inside a bead. I used a dab from the glue gun to hold them in place.

I filled the jars with colourful dried fruits and seeds, arranged in layers.

When you see them all together, they make quite the swarm!

In situ they look rather more the part. What a beautiful table!

And many congratulations to Becci and James.