We had a basket of little honey jars by the door and forty blank tags I had cut out two nights before. I sat at my friend Priya’s kitchen island with a pen and drew a total blank. You would think two words would be easy. They were not. I wrote “thank you” and it looked like a sticky note left on a coworker’s lunch.
The favor itself barely matters. I gave out honey, my cousin gave out tiny succulents that half died on the drive home, and nobody remembers either one. What people read is the tag, and the tag is the only place the favor sounds like it came from you and not a party store. So that is where I spent the time. Probably too much of it.
Below are the tag templates I printed from, plus the lines I actually used and the ones I scrapped. A couple of the links are affiliate links, so if you grab a set it tosses a few cents my way. Does not change your price.
Some links below are affiliate links. If you download one for your day, I earn a tiny bit and it changes nothing on your end.
The honey-jar tags that started this whole problem
These are the ones I tied onto our honey jars. Warm, a little rustic, with a print-and-cut line so I was not hunting for the edge with scissors at midnight like I did with my place cards. I ran twelve through my printer, cut along the marks, and they came out even, which for me is a small miracle.
On these I wrote “a little sweetness, from us to you.” I know. But it was honey, so it landed, and my aunt actually pocketed hers. The set has room for a date line under the saying if you want it, which I used on half and skipped on the rest because I ran low on space.
One gripe. The print-and-cut registration was a hair off on my first sheet, so the cut line clipped the corner of one tag. I nudged the file down two millimeters in the print dialog and it was fine after that. Just check sheet one before you commit the stack.
When the favor is plain and the tag has to carry it
My maid of honor used these for her sister’s shower and I borrowed the file for our welcome table. There is a thin leaf border down one side, nothing loud, so a short line sits in the middle and breathes. Good for the wording I could not stop fiddling with.
I tested “thanks for celebrating with us” on one and “so glad you came” on another, taped both to the cabinet, and asked Priya which one did not sound like an out-of-office reply. She picked the second. I went with the second.
The catch is the font is light gray by default and my home printer turned it into a ghost. I darkened it to almost-black before printing and then it read across the room. If your printer streaks, take it to a copy shop, the one on Galer near me does these for pennies.
For the couple who wants it to look effortless and is lying about it
These are stripped down. A small frame, a lot of white space, and that is the point. I gave a set to a coworker getting married in a barn and she put one word on each one. Just “cheers.” That was it.
I almost did the same for ours. I printed a sheet that said nothing but our two first names and a tiny heart between them, lived with it on the fridge for a day, and it grew on me. Simple reads as confident even when you spent forty minutes deciding on it.
Watch the cut marks though. On thinner cardstock the print-and-cut lines were faint and I overshot one with the scissors. Bump to a heavier stock, around 80 lb cover, and the cut guides show up better.
The set I used for the favors that did not survive the car
My cousin’s succulent favors, the doomed ones, came tied with these. Earthy, recycled-paper look, the kind of tag that matches a plant or a packet of seeds or anything you want to seem a little wholesome.
She wrote “watch us grow” on hers, which made me groan and then I admit it suited the little plants. For seed favors a friend of mine did “plant these and think of us,” and I have stolen that line twice since for other people’s showers.
My one note, the brown paper tone the file uses prints darker than it looks on screen, so a black saying can disappear into it. I switched the text to a deep olive instead and it popped without looking like a highlighter. Took one wasted page to land on that.
Tiny tags for tiny jars, learned after the spice incident
If your favor is small, like jam or salt or those little spice blends, these are sized for it. I found out the hard way that a normal tag swamps a two-inch jar. Looked like a luggage label on a thimble.
These are scaled down, so the line has to be short, which honestly fixed my overwriting. On jam jars I did “spread the love” and felt nothing about it, but my mother-in-law thought it was clever, so. For a salt favor a friend wrote “seasoned to celebrate” and I still think that one is the best pun I have heard at a wedding.
The downside is there is barely room for names and a date together. Pick one. I put just the date on these and let the bigger welcome tags carry our names.
The one I keep coming back to for winter weddings
A friend got married the Saturday after Thanksgiving and I helped her with these. Clean label shape, a little seasonal without being covered in snowflakes, so it worked for her cocoa-packet favors without screaming holiday party.
We put “warm wishes from the newlyweds” on the cocoa ones and it actually fit the vibe, which surprised me because I expected to hate it. She added their wedding date in small type at the bottom and left the names off, said everyone there already knew who they were.
The quibble is the label has a defined border, so if your printer alignment drifts even slightly the edge looks lopsided once you cut. Print one, hold it up, and if the border is uneven shift the file before you run the batch. Cheap thing to check.
The bigger tag for hotel baskets, where you have actual room to talk
These are not for jars. They are the larger tags for welcome baskets, the ones you leave at the front desk for out-of-town guests. More space means you can finally write a real sentence instead of cramming two words.
On ours I wrote “so happy you traveled to be with us, help yourself to everything inside,” and added our names and the date underneath because here there was finally room for all of it. My husband held the cardstock flat while I fed each one through, same as the seating chart, we are nothing if not consistent.
The one annoyance, the template defaults to a font that is pretty but thin, and on a bigger tag thin text looks underbaked. I bumped the weight one notch before printing a stack and it read much better from across the lobby.
What People Keep Asking
What do you write on a favor tag?
Honestly? Less than you think. A short thank-you, your names, and the date covers it, and most of the lines I agonized over got cut down to four words anyway. I started with whole sentences and ended with “a little sweetness, from us” because the favor said the rest.
If you are stuck, write the favor first. Honey turns into “sweetness,” seeds into “watch us grow,” cocoa into “warm wishes.” The favor hands you the line if you let it.
Punny or simple?
Depends who is reading it, and I went back and forth on this for days. A pun lands when the favor sets it up, like “seasoned to celebrate” on a salt jar, which a friend used and I am still a little jealous of. It falls flat when you force it onto something that does not match.
When in doubt I went simple. “Thank you” with our names did not make anyone laugh, but nobody cringed either, and that felt like the safer trade at 200 tags.
Do I add our names and date?
I did, but not on everything. On the tiny jam jars there was no room, so I put just the date and left the names for the bigger welcome tags. Cramming all of it onto a two-inch tag made it look like a receipt.
My rule ended up being one extra detail per tag. Big tag, names and date both. Tiny tag, pick the one that matters and let it go. Nobody is cross-referencing your favors for the year.
Before You Print a Stack
I spent more time on those forty tags than on the actual seating chart, which tells you something about how I prioritize under pressure. They tied onto honey jars that are long gone and I could not tell you a single thing about most of the favors at weddings I have been to. The tags I remember.
So print a test one on plain paper, write your line, tape it to the fridge, and read it the next morning before you commit. If it still sounds like you and not a greeting card, run the stack. That is the whole trick.