Our wedding total costs were under $3000, but thanks to great friends and family, after the gifts and donated food and decorations we spent less than $100 out of pocket.

Click here to download this tutorial in PDF.

What you’ll need to make 200 miniature candy favors:

Hershey’s Assorted Miniatures (cost is ~$0.05 each)
Download my Photoshop image, which must be customized
Download my wrappers template (Word Document). This also must be customized
Paper in your choice of color or design
Glue stick

Customization information you will need to gather:

• Name(s)
• Date
• Favorite/appropriate quotation or saying
• An image to portray event, if desired (i.e. wedding bells for a wedding, rattle for a baby shower)
• Decide on a font choice (bear in mind that not all fonts print out legibly so be sure to test the label before using)

Have you ever been to a wedding or baby shower where they had those little chocolate candy bars wrapped with a personalized label? A friend of ours took it upon herself to make us a bunch of these little personalized favors when we were remarried last October.

I was so delighted with them! I’d seen them while planning for our wedding, but I wasn’t about to spend THAT much money to buy them already made up, and my free time was already maxed out with all the wedding details.

It was such a surprise for my friend to make these little candies for us, that I decided to make them for my friend who was getting married a few weeks later.

I asked my son to take pictures, because I wanted to produce an online tutorial. I’d found a few tutorials, but I knew I could do a better job of detailing the process. It actually went very quickly and only took me about three hours to wrap the candy bars once I got the wrappers printed.

I created an image in Photoshop, (click on the link to download the .psd file – you must have Photoshop or a program that will allow you to modify the file in order to use) which looks like this:

Here are the specs on the image.

450 pixels width, 900 pixels height. Resolution 300 pixels/inch.

You will need to modify the image with the information you need it to contain, since obviously you aren’t Mary and John.

Next, you’ll need to plunk your image into the Word document I’ve created. The page is setup in landscape, with 1/2 inch margins at the sides, top and bottom.

Replace all the images in the file with your own, then print out a test page.

I’m assuming you’ve already got the candy: Hershey’s Assorted Miniatures. I looked and looked and LOOKED to find little candy bars with an outer wrapping. I thought the silver (or gold) wrapping was one piece, and the label was another piece. I thought I’d be taking the label off, and putting on my own “label”.

Well, that’s dating myself, because apparently that’s how it USED to be. Nowadays they use one piece of paper with silver or gold, plus the label.

We bought 5 bags which cost $2.00 each. Each bag contained 40 miniature candy bars. The cost for each miniature candy bar came to one nickel each.

Now when you consider you will spend $0.45 and up for each little bar if you buy it already done, it is well worth the time to do this yourself, or ask someone to do it for you. On the other hand, if you don’t really care about money, go on ahead and spend $90 plus shipping for something you could have only spent $10 on. 😉

Okay, so now you have your image modified, plunked into your document, and your little labels are all printed and cut out. You’re ready to start labeling!

First fold the label on the lightly printed line near the top.

Place the folded edge over the top back edge of the candy bar.

Wrap around…

Holding in place, lightly smear with your glue stick.

Here the glue has been applied.

Pick up the candy, holding the label securely, and fold over so the glue seals onto the label.

And there you go!

Here are the 200 candies all labeled and ready to go. It took less than 3 hours once I had the labels printed out. Three hours to cut the labels, and glue them onto the candy bars.

There are so many things these little candy bars could be used for – weddings, bridal showers, baby showers, children’s parties, adult birthday parties or anniversaries. They take little time and they are a very special little personalized gift.

By the way, if you don’t use Microsoft Office, the document works perfectly in OpenOffice.org’s Writer.

If you have trouble with any of this, please drop me a line by using the contact button at top. I will be happy to clarify my instructions. If you are a frugal bride or mom-to-be, I would be happy to help you out by customizing the image.

Let me know if you try this at home! 🙂

You may also download a printer friendly PDF version of this post.

You may also wish to read my other wedding pages:

• How I Wet Washed My Gorgeous Beaded Wedding Gown (Bought from Goodwill for $25)
• Our Wedding Under $3000
• My Review of Tightwad’s Frugal Bride e-guide

This post was included in the Festival of Frugality #141, The Host Bailed Out Edition on September 23, 2008. Thank you My Two Dollars for including my post!  This post was included in the Make It From Scratch Carnival on September 16, 2008. Thank you Funny About Money for including my post!

Yours Truly,