Mrs Corn Posts: The Secondary Favor

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the favors I decided to make were ornaments, filled with some sand, shells and a square tag with our monogram and our wedding date on it. I am also making the centerpieces for the wedding.

Keeping in mind the sand and sea and glass inspiration from my previous post, I decided to use the ornaments as part of the table-setting. This meant that for maximum impact, I wanted everyone at the table to get an ornament. Of course, most of the people at our wedding will be couples; aunts and uncles, cousins/friends/siblings and spouses, so then there's the issue of potentially sending home guests with two ornaments...I can only hope that they will actually keep one of them and hang it on their tree, so the thought of every household having one extra to just toss away made me sad after all of the time and energy it was taking to make them.

So, I started thinking about an alternative favor that I could do with the glass ornament (since I had already purchased them and too much time had gone by to take them back). I was reminded of when I started looking into making the favors in the first place and I happened upon this how-to for making rosemary salt on Martha Stewart.com.

It dawned on me that I could make the rosemary salt and use the ornaments as the vessel instead of a big jar, that way people could have a small, useful secondary favor to take home with them. Then came the issue of needing to seal the top to keep the salt relatively fresh which the ornament top would not be able to do. After a quick brainstorming session, I decided to purchase corks and use them in place of the ornament tops.

In keeping with the 'coastal' theme, I ordered 15 lbs of Pure Ocean Sea Salt from Salt Works.com. Below is a picture of one 5 lb bag (next to a 1 lb bag of coffee beans for scale).

Then I went to the grocery store and purchased 8 packages of rosemary; 6 to use in the making of the salt and 2 to use for the garnish in the favor.

Following the directions from Martha Stewart, I made the rosemary salt in 2.5 lb batches, each with one package of rosemary. You can see in the picture below what happens to the rosemary as the salt heats up which is why you have to sort it out before making the favors.

Using my kitchen scale, I measured out 4 oz of salt per ornament (or roughly 2/3 of a cup) and poured it in with a completely ridiculous method of rolling up a piece of paper and using it as a funnel. Prior to pouring the salt, I cut a small sprig of fresh rosemary and put it in the favor. I should also point out that in the picture below you can see the bag of corks that I got from Widgetco.com for about $7.00.

Then I made an explanation of the salt favors so that people knew what the heck they could use it for and attached it to the back of the already created tag that has our monogram and wedding date on it.

The final product (on the day I made them).
I took a picture of a favor this morning, and as expected the sprig of rosemary is no longer a vibrant green. I was expecting that. The good news is that the salt acts as a preserver and keeps the sprig from getting rancid; instead it just dries like an herb.

And just for kicks...here is a picture taken this morning of one of the ornaments. You can really see in this picture how the concrete looks more like New England sand than the craft sand.