When I was planning my wedding and trying to decide what to give as favors I started to think about the concept of giving out favors at weddings. The conclusion I came to in my thinking was that favors are a small memento to give to your guests as a remembrance of the day you got married. My problem in choosing what to give our guests was that I wanted the favors to be practical, inexpensive, and yet remind our guests of our day.
Around that time I heard someone say that the refrigerator is the communication center of almost every house. It was then that I began to think about making magnets as favors. My fiancé and I hoped that our guests would put our magnets on their refrigerators and use them to hold up drawings and the like, and every now and then would see the magnet and think about us.
So, here is one way to make magnets for favors at your wedding.
You will need:
Photograph of you as a couple. (Or a poem or quote that you really like.)
Scanner (if you use photo - obviously, I do not recommend that you go out and buy a scanner, so ask your friends, church, library, or try your local printing store.)
Computer with publishing program (again, please do not go out and buy a computer, but ask if you can borrow someone's, or try the library.)
Paper cutter (most churches or schools have one of these)
Business Card-sized magnets (found at Office Supply stores.)
Okay, here is what you do:
After scanning your photo into the computer, open up your publishing program - I am going to describe how to do this in MS Word 97, but it should be fairly similar in other versions. (If you have MS Publisher, you can also use their wizard to help you out.) Open up a new document. Go to "Tools" in your toolbar and choose "Envelopes and Labels". Under "Labels" click the "Options" button. Scroll down under "Product Number" until you get to "5371 Business Card". Click "Okay". Now click "New Document". This should create an entire sheet of business card-sized spaces for you to create your magnet in.
Next, in the toolbar under "Insert" choose "Picture" and then "From File". Choose the picture that you have scanned into your computer and click "Insert". You may need to adjust the size or crop your picture a bit to get it just right on the first of the business cards. Once you have it in place, you can "Copy" and "Paste" the picture on the rest of the cards.
Then, choose "Insert" and "Text Box". Place the text box wherever you would like it to go, and type your text into it. Matt and I wrote, "Thank you for making our joy complete," at the top and "Matt and Kelly Kons July 22, 2000," at the bottom.
Once you have them looking exactly how you would like them to, save your document to a disk. Then head to your local QuickPrint or Kinko's. They will print as many copies as you need in high quality color or black and white for a fairly decent price. They may offer to cut the cards for you, but this is usually pretty expensive and we chose to cut them ourselves (Kinko's had a fancy paper cutter right in their store that they let us use.)
After cutting the cards apart, we had Kinko's laminate each individual card - this can also get expensive and is not necessary, so you can skip this step if it is not in your budget or not important to you (or you can attempt to do it yourself at home with lamination paper).
Last, take each of your cut cards and carefully attach them to the business card-sized magnets (which should have one sticky side to them).
Make sure to make a few extra in case you accidentally make a mistake and for you to plaster onto your refrigerator!
And, as always, don't forget to be creative. Just because I did it one way doesn't mean that you shouldn't try it another way. Give your ideas a try! You never know how awesome it may turn out.
For example, Pamela wrote me a few weeks ago to tell me about the magnets she is making for her wedding and I am going to share her ideas with you next time (July 30, 2001)!
Until then, take care and remain sane. Your wedding is just a day, but your marriage is for the rest of your life - always remember that!
