Wedding Shower Wednesday: Mason Jar Sweet Tea Favors

Dear Em,
On a gorgeous day last weekend, your stunning Aunt Andrea married her sweetheart- your now official Uncle Lowell. It was such a beautiful & fun event for our whole family. While the wedding has already happened, I'm not quite finished recapping the wedding shower. I have just a few more Wedding Shower Wednesday posts before I wrap up this segment for a little while.

One of my very favorite projects of the whole wedding shower were the favors. Pretty early in the planning process, I did a Google search for Charleston themed wedding favors. Since it was a destination wedding, I thought it would be fun to highlight something the area is known for. I found a couple images of mason jar sweet tea favors, & I swooned. I love, love, love sweet tea. I love, love, love mason jars. Plus, using actual lemons in the mason jars would give everything a natural pop of color.

I was prepared to beg the rest of the bridesmaids to agree with me on the mason jar sweet tea shower favors, but they really liked the idea without me having to get down on my hands & knees. We ordered mason jars in bulk (I think at the time they were least expensive at KMart). I also bought a large box of orange pekoe tea bags, & two boxes of sugar cubes (we would also need lemons for the recipe but I planned to buy them fresh right before the shower).

We debated whether to add glitter to them (like we did with the center pieces), but in the end we wanted people to be able to drink their sweet tea in the mason jars & modpodge glitter might make that difficult. Still, we wanted to add cute pops of color. We tried to cut out circles of fabric to place between the disc part of the lid & the band of the lid. It was kind of difficult to work with & looked a little frumpy. I looked at the glitter paper that we had bought in bulk for some of our other projects & realized it was the perfect thing to add a little glamour & pop of color. Using the lids as a stencil for the circle size, we cut out a circle of glitter paper for each mason jar.

We made labels which included the Bride & the Groom's names, "Thank You" for coming, "See y'all in Charleston," & a recipe for the sweet tea. We painted a rim of gold glitter paint around the labels to add a little extra fun. Then we filled the mason jars with tea bags & sugar cubes, put on the glitter tops & lids, & fastened the labels on using pieces of pink twine.

I was absolutely giddy with how they turned out. Each one of the bridesmaids had added their own fabulous idea to the project, & as a result, they came out better than I had ever hoped. They were so pretty & so fun.

Since we created the sweet tea favors a couple months before the shower, I waited until the night before the shower to place newly bought lemons into the jars. There was just one problem. None of the thirty lemons I had bought were fitting into the jars. They were all too big! You & I ran to the grocery store, mason jar in hand, & measured 30 more lemons that would fit (there were a few weird looks at the crazy lady who was hoarding all of the lemons).

Sigh. Crisis averted. We placed the favors in the venue, & I fell in love with the way they added to the pink & sparkly decor. They were fun. They were practical. They gave a nod to the fun location where we would soon be celebrating the Bride & the Groom's wedding. There were a few bumps, but in the end, I loved these shower favors more than any other shower favors I've ever seen.

Needless to say,  with the 30 original lemons that we couldn't use, I tried a lot of lemon recipes in the next couple weeks. You know what they say, when life give you lemons...make a lot of yummy lemon flavored food. And yes, we did make freshly squeezed lemonade for the very first time.

I love you so,
Mommy