My Lemon & Blue Italian Ceramic Tile Themed Engagement Party Favors (Part 2)

Here’s a part 2 of my engagement party favor ideas post. I had to break this up into two posts because there’s just so much content to share with y’all! If you haven’t read part 1 and you want to know where I got my materials and inspiration from, check out my post here.

To recap, I got engaged back in January in Dubai in the middle of the desert (no, really!) at a beautiful resort called the Qasr Al Arab Desert Resort by Anantara. If you ever find yourself traveling to Dubai and want to take a few days in a remote desert destination, check out this resort – it’s absolutely breathtaking!

I outlined all of the materials and where I got them in my previous post (with links) and in this part, I’ll walk you through how I put it all together.

Step 1: Measuring, Cutting and Placing Ribbon

For these engagement party favor ideas, I started off by wrapping ribbon around each of the baskets as shown above. This part was tricky because I had initially tried with my go-to E6000 glue, but the ribbon wouldn’t stay put. This glue also tends to take a day or so to fully dry. And since I’ve got about 18 baskets to make, there was no way I was about to sit through and wait for all 18 to dry.

So instead I had some thick yarn I used to sew the ends of the ribbon in place into the basket. These baskets have little holes in between the woven wicker so it was easy to get some thread through. I used a clamp to hold down the ribbon as I sewed the sides in place.

As you can see from the photos above, I cut the blue ribbon just enough so that it overlaps in the middle. The next thing was figure out how to secure the ribbon ends together so that they did not come apart. I initially tried glue as I mentioned earlier but that didn’t hold well!

Step 2: Ribbons -> Bows

What I did was cut a long enough piece of one of the burlap ribbons (here I’m showing how I did this with yellow burlap ribbon), push it through the bottom middle, and knot it as tight as i could so that it kept the two ends together:

Here I simply did a single knot. No double knot and no wrap to a bow.

I actually made the bow by criss-crossing the ends of the ribbon over one another. Then I doubled up on a piece of yarn, and I again threaded it underneath the knot, and secured it by tightening the yarn with it’s own double knot. It’s a bit hard to explain, so hopefully the photos below can explain it a little better. I did this because the thick yarn would’ve kept the bow looking a lot cleaner instead of trying to bow knot the thick burlap ribbon itself.

Don’t get me wrong, its still a great option for making bows on it’s own, but it would’ve taken a lot more length and would’ve made the bows a lot chunkier. I wanted something relatively flat against the baskets.

The last part was I took some more thread and used it to push and place the bow up, and secured it against the top part of the basket. Notice how in the photo the bow arcs upwards. This makes it so the wooden “FLOWER” stencil is completely hidden (If you’re not sure what I’m referring to, take a look at the first part of this tutorial – it shows the basket as-is – and it’s got this dumb stencil glued onto it).

This was the hardest (and longest part) of putting these engagement party favors together. Now it’s time for the fun part!

Step 3: Fill the baskets with Goodies!

I went to my local wine and spirits store and grabbed 18 of these Amour mini sparkling brut bottles. They were the perfect size to fit into the basket. I paired each of these with an perfectly themed lemon straw so that they can sip their champagne right from the bottle!

I had also made candles a few months back – blueberry cheesecake scent! These came in a small, 6 oz glass jars with matching glass lids. I embellished them with a few felt leaves and blue felt balls to give it a sort of blueberry bunch look. They came out super cute and gave off a great cold throw!

The candle, straw and mini champagne bottle are all wrapped into the matching floral blue scarf. Then I used the lemon napkin holder to loosely tie it all together into a small package.

I then placed the small bouquet of peonies and hydrangeas neatly to the side. Everything came together quite nicely!

And here’s the final product, all together and ready to be given to my girlfriends!

These were a hit! My friends all loved them and thought they were adorable!

I just love doing littlie projects such as this. I try to stick to a budget but then I end up getting carried away and spend more than I intended. But its worth it though when I see how happy my friends are of their gifts! It makes for memorable occasions!

Hope you enjoyed my post on my engagement party favor ideas!