We made 110 little jars of honey for our reception. My cousin Priya and I sat on her balcony in July, sweating, filling them with a tiny funnel I bought for $3 and immediately regretted. The honey was the easy part. The jars looked like jars. Naked, sort of sad, lined up on her counter like they were waiting for a price sticker.
What fixed it was a tag. One small printed tag on twine, and suddenly the same jar looked like we meant it. That is the whole secret nobody puts on a Pinterest board. The thing inside the favor barely matters. People grab it, read the tag, and decide in half a second if you tried or if you panicked at Michaels on a Tuesday.
So below are the templates I leaned on, plus a couple I tested for friends after. I print one on plain paper, hold it at arm’s length, and squint to see if the names still read. If it survives the squint it goes on the good cardstock. A few of these are affiliate links, so if you grab one it tosses a little something my way. Doesn’t cost you a cent.
Full disclosure, a few links are affiliate links. Use one and a few cents come back to me, never anything added to your price.
The labels that saved my naked jars
These are the shapes I reached for first. Oval, scalloped, a few odd ones I didn’t end up using. You drop your text in and the outline holds, which mattered because I was doing this at 11pm and had no patience left for fiddling with anchor points.
I did our honey jars with the small oval, gold ink, names and the date and nothing else. Priya said it looked like a brand. High praise from a woman who works in packaging.
One thing. The vintage style runs a touch ornate, so if your fonts are already busy it gets loud fast. I stripped mine down to just two lines of text and it calmed right down.
When you need a hundred tags and zero design skills
I sent this one to my maid of honor, Dana, who insists she cannot make anything look good. She typed in two words, hit print, and texted me a photo of forty tags drying on her radiator. So that’s the bar it clears.
The spacing is the win here. You change the names and it doesn’t shove everything sideways. I have lost whole evenings to templates that re-flow the second you touch them, and this isn’t one of those.
The default font is on the thin side though. At Dana’s dim venue it nearly vanished, so she bumped the weight one notch before the real run. One test page, lesson learned, cheap.
My backup when the first batch ran out
I ran out of tags. Of course I did. Friday night before a Saturday wedding, one box of cardstock left, and I needed thirty more. Tagily was what I grabbed because the layout was close enough that nobody would clock the difference across a room.
You get a handful of shapes per sheet, so I ganged them up four to a page and trimmed with the paper cutter at the library. Wedged in there between someone printing a resume.
My gripe is the cut lines are faint. I went over them in pencil first or I’d have sliced through a name. Tiny annoyance, but worth knowing before you’re standing at a guillotine cutter at nine at night.
The set I keep recommending to budget brides
A coworker getting married on basically nothing asked me what to use, and I pointed her here. She had maybe sixty dollars left for the whole favor situation. This stretched it.
She did little tags for jam jars, kraft paper, brown twine, very farmers-market in a good way. Printed them on the back of leftover cardstock from her programs so nothing went to waste. I stole that move for later, honestly.
The one catch is the margins sit a bit close on a couple of the layouts, so a home printer can clip the edge. Scale it to 95% before you print a stack and you’re fine. She found that out on page one, not page forty, thank god.
For the hotel bags nobody expects to be cute
We did welcome baskets for the out-of-town people, mostly snacks and Advil and a handwritten map that was wildly inaccurate. The bags needed something on the front so they didn’t read as a CVS run.
This tag is bigger than the favor tags, sized for a basket or a bag handle, which I didn’t realize until I printed one favor-sized by accident and it came out comically tiny. Use the dimensions it gives you.
I tied ours on with the same twine from the jars so the whole thing matched. Cost me nothing extra. The only fuss was the hole punch didn’t line up with the pre-marked spot, so I just punched my own. Whatever.
The fancy edge without the fancy scissors
I cannot cut a scallop by hand to save my life. I tried once with craft scissors and it looked like a kid did it. So these scalloped shapes were the cheat I needed.
If you’ve got a cutting machine they’re clean and fast. If you don’t, like me at the time, you can still print them with the scallop drawn on and trim careful with a small pair of scissors. Slower, but the line gives you something to follow.
Heads up that the SVG side assumes you have a Cricut or similar. I didn’t, so I used the printable version and just accepted slightly wobbly edges. Held up across the room. Nobody at table six was inspecting my curves.
The favor that earned its keep
Little bottles of sanitizer as favors sounds like a 2020 leftover, I know. But people actually used them, which is more than I can say for the bubbles at my sister’s wedding that sat untouched in a basket all night.
The labels wrap a small travel bottle, the two-ounce kind from the dollar section. I ran ours through at the copy shop on Beckett because my own printer streaks anything with color. Forty cents a page there, worth it.
Measure your bottle before you print. I assumed all the little ones were the same height and they are not, so my first batch left a gap of bare plastic at the bottom. Reprinted at the right size and it wrapped clean.
The Questions I Get Most
What DIY favors look professional?
Honestly? The favor itself almost never decides it. I’ve seen a bag of homemade granola look more expensive than boxed chocolates, and the only difference was the tag and the twine.
What reads as professional is restraint. Two lines of text, one ink color, paper that isn’t flimsy. The second you crowd a tag with three fonts and a monogram it starts looking like a craft fair. Ask me how I know.
How do I make a big batch?
I learned this the hard way at 110 jars. Gang your tags up on the page, four or six to a sheet, then cut them all at once on a paper cutter instead of scissoring one at a time. The library by me has a good guillotine cutter for free.
Do the boring part in a line, factory style. Print everything first. Then cut everything. Then punch everything. Then tie everything. Switching tasks every jar is what eats your whole Saturday. Priya and I figured that out around jar twenty and it was a different night after.
What keeps them from looking cheap?
Good cardstock and a test print, in that order. Thin paper curls and screams budget no matter how nice the design is. I print one on plain paper first, hold it across the room, and squint. If the names still read from the couch, it works.
The other thing is matching. Same twine on the favors and the welcome bags, same ink, same font. It costs nothing and it’s the thing that makes a pile of handmade stuff look like one set instead of a yard sale.
One Last Thing
None of this is hard, it’s just fussy, and fussy at midnight feels like hard. Start the favors way earlier than you think you need to. The tag matters more than the thing it’s tied to, the cardstock matters more than the design, and a test page will save you a whole wasted box.
That’s the lot of them. The ones I actually used, or printed for someone who texted me in a panic the week before. Print one, squint at it from across the room, and if it still reads, you’re done. Go sit down.