Custom Candy Wrappers

I've been going back and forth a lot on what I want to do for bridal shower favors. I'm not a knick knacky kind of person, and didn't want to present my guests with knick knacks they likely would never use. After much debate, I decided on chocolate. First of all, it's all women, and let's face it, ladies love chocolate. Second, they can eat it and be done with it. No clutter when they get home.

I saw these online, and it got the wheels turning. Unfortunately, to get the number of wrappers I was going to need, it was going to cost at least $70, and that isn't even factoring in the cost of the chocolate. I quickly decided that I needed to find a better alternative, and turned to my trusty Microsoft publisher program to do the trick.

I originally wanted to design a big Hershey bar wrapper, as I thought it would be nice to give everyone a big candy bar as they left. Unfortunately, what I learned is that they no longer make the standard sized Hershey bars with the foil and paper wrappers, and now wrap them all in plastic. As a matter of fact, ALL affordable standard sized chocolate bars available in stores are wrapped in plastic. (Where is the fund raising kid selling chocolate bars when you need him?!?) The only way to get the foil wrapped candy is to buy the GIANT sized Hershey bars, or the minis. The giant ones were too expensive, so I decided that minis were going to have to suffice.

After a bit of fiddling, I came up with a good template for the mini chocolates that I was able to customize into a few different designs. Unfortunately, I only have a black and white laser printer, so I had to stick to monochromatic designs. These are a few photos of my home made attempt to make my own candy wrappers.



I'm really happy with how they came out. I ordered some cute aqua organza pouches off eBay that I'm going to use to package the favors...one of each design per favor. All in all, enough favors for 30-40 guests only ended up costing me about $25. Not too shabby.

I've even considered designing some templates to sell in PDF "print yourself" format through an avenue like Etsy. Since people would be printing themselves, I wouldn't have to stick to the black and white designs. I don't know...just a thought :-)