Five of The Best Teacup Favours

Five ways to fill your Vintage Teacup Favours

If you liked my Teacup Favour tutorial here, but don't want to use sweets, here are some other ideas for what you could fill your teacups with.

Planning a vintage wedding? Check out my Pinterest Board here for more inspiration, and watch this space for a DIY Doily Wedding Invite Tutorial.

Use your teacup as a mini terrarium!
Plant with succulents and moss for a gift that will keep giving after your big day.

Turn your teacup into a candle!
If you don't fancy the time-consuming business of making all your candles, you could simply pop in a tea light or votive.

Fill your teacup with loose sweets.
This saves you the hassle of wrapping the sweets but you would have to fill them at the venue, and it would be a little harder for guests to transport!

Add a personalised teabag and let your guests use the vintage lovelies as they were originally intended!
The teabag tag can also double up as a save the date or place name.

Fill it with a posy of beautiful flowers!
Wet a small piece of Oasis and place in the bottom. This is a beautiful look but requires making the morning of the wedding or the day before if you want them to still look fresh!

What did you use as favours at your wedding? Did you make them yourself? Let me know if you have any other ideas of ways to fill a favour teacup!

DIY Vintage Teacup Wedding Favour

A Tutorial from my own Vintage-Inspired Wedding

I'm quite excited to write a tutorial based on my own wedding, as it's an excuse to look back over all the photographs and re-live the planning and the day itself. So here we go ... here is how to make your own favours from vintage teacups! 

House of Newns Vintage Teacup Favours // Adam Drake Photography

There are so many options for favours at weddings, and if you have chosen to make them yourself the possibilities for personalisation are endless. I chose to give teacups filled with sweets to all the women at our wedding. If you would like to do the same, here is what you need.

If you fancy filling your teacups with something other than sweets, check out my post on Five of the Best Vintage Teacups here.

What You Will Need

• Teacups! I sourced mine in sets of six or so from eBay and family. You could also try thrift and charity shops. Steer clear of general auctions and well know potteries if you are trying to keep costs down!
• Sweets I bought mine from Macro in large tubs. Amazon and Hobbycraft also sell sweets in bulk but they are a little more expensive to buy this way rather than from a cash and carry. We went for sherbet lemons, strawberries and cream, and rosy apples.
• Cellophane I bought a roll of 50cm x 20m cellophane in the florists' seciton of Hobbycraft. I used plain but you can get it with little patterns and designs on too!
• Florists' Wire Again I got this from Hobbycraft - I bought the Oasis (brand) bobbin of wire rather than the packs of individual wires and had more than enough
• Small sticky foam pads - Hobbycraft again but most stationers' will sell these
• Strong scissors
• Luggage tags (optional)
• A team of bridesmaids or helpers!

My place setting on the day - spot the teacup top left! // Adam Drake Photography

Method

Once you have chosen your teacups and decided if you want them matching or if you are going to mix and match the cups and saucers (I did a combo of both) you might want to give them all a wipe or clean - though as you have the cellophane this is optional!

Mix and match teacups and saucers for a more shabby chic look

Next, I would recommend securing the teacup to the saucer. I used 3-4 small foam pads on the bottom of each cup. This will help you transport them and allow people to take them home without breaking them!

Some of the 50+ teacups I sourced - one for each woman guest!

Now you need to wrap your sweets ready to go into the teacups. Measure your teacups first to gauge roughly how many sweets you will need - I think we used 6-7 of large boiled sweets.

Cut squares of cellophane and place the sweets in the middle, then gather together the four corners and twist the sweets from the bottom. Now tie a length of the florists' wire around the top of the sweets, leaving the corners free to spread out a little, as seen here. it's not a precise science so don't worry to much if some look a little more unruly than others!

House of Newns Vintage Teacup Favour // Adam Drake Photography

This is where the bridal party comes in handy! I had a favour-making evening at my house and each person had a different job. Eg: One person stuck the saucers to the cups; one person cut the cellophane squares; one cut the lengths of wire; one measured the sweets into the cellophane then twisted and tied them etc. We had Prosecco and bellinis and it was great fun! (Mother-in-laws are optional.)

Once all your teacups have their sweets, you may also want to tie luggage tags to the teacups to double them up as place settings. I hand wrote mine but stenciling or stamping looks great too.

The table displays with mis-matched teacups favours - the night before hence no flowers!

And voila! You have some beautiful and personal gifts for your guests. My only other tip would be to write 'take me home' on the tag too - some of my guests didn't realise they could take the teacups as well as the sweets so my bridesmaids had to go round the tables telling everyone!

Here are a few pics from my wedding ... just because!

House of Newns // Adam Drake Photography

DIY Scrabble Wedding Present

What I Made Today

So here it is - the first post on the blog!

I thought I'd kick off with a mini DIY tutorial of something that has been popular on my Pinterest Board 'What I Made Today' - a wedding present I made for my brother and his fiancee when they got married. 

It's a really fun and personal present, with so many variables and options. You could also use it for an engagement or new baby gift!

What you will need

• A box frame (try Ikea or Wilkinsons)
• An old Scrabble board (charity shop, ebay etc.)
• Multi-purpose glue
• Scissors (possibly a small hack saw!)
• Scanner and printer (optional)

It really doesn't matter what kind of Scrabble set you use, but it may affect the size of your finished piece and also how easy it is to resize the Scrabble board. The Scrabble board I used here was a travel Scrabble set, which came with a perforated board for the small letters to clip in to. Travel sets have smaller tiles; children's Scrabble a more simplistic sans serif font; normal Scrabble will give you a larger size tile and so you may want to but your box frame according to the size you want you finished piece to be.

I also created one for my cousin Gavin and his wife, don't tell them it was a recycled gift idea...!

Method

Take the back piece out of your box frame and lay it on the Scrabble board - I chose to place the centre of the Scrabble board at the centre of the frame. Mark or draw around the frame's backing so you can see how much scrabble board will fill the frame.
Tip: you could use masking tape to avoid marking the Scrabble board if you go wrong.

Choose the words that you would like to spell out. I went for first names and, in the top example, 'love', 'marriage' and rings'. Have a play around on the Scrabble board to see how you can interlink the names and what arrangement this gives you; the chances are there will be a couple of different combos. 
Tip: use the vowels to allow easiest intersections.

Bear in mind the shape of your box frame - landscape, portrait or square. I had chosen a square frame so was looking for a balance of words covering the whole square.
Tip: once you are happy, take a snap of the layout on your phone to allow you to recreate it more easily later.

Remove the tiles and cut the Scrabble board down so that it will fit inside the box frame, cutting just inside the marks you made earlier. Depending on the type of Scrabble board you have, you may be able to do this with strong kitchen scissors, or you may need to use a small hack saw. 
Tip: you could scan in your Scrabble board and print it out on paper, letting you reuse it as many times as you want!

Now glue your letters down onto the Scrabble board - take care to ensure glue doesn't seep round the edges. When dry, you are ready to place your board and layout in the box frame.
Tip: If your Scrabble board is quite thick, you may be able to do away with the original box frame backing.

Happy Scrabbling!