THE Favor of 2012: Fancy Laser Pointers

Some might say it’s too early to declare the definitive HOT favor of the year, but with wedding season just around the corner, engaged couples need to know right now!

Put away your mason jars and mail me your cake pops so I can dispose of them properly. It’s 2012, people! If you want to give your guests a favor they’ll actually take home and enjoy, give them a fancy laser pointer.

fancy freakin laser pointer

If there’s only one thing you take away from reading Favor Craver, I want it to be the understanding that a great wedding favor is memorable, beautiful, and useful. A fancy laser pointer is all of these things, and maybe even more. Think about it: who doesn’t love to disrupt air traffic and promote cat insanity?

laser pointer cat

The best part about these favors? They tie in so memorably with the ultra-hot trend of using the early 90’s laserbeam photo backdrop for your wedding photobooth! I mean, you ARE doing that, right?

Now that I’ve clued you in to the hottest favor trend of the year, how about some more laser-focused wedding inspiration? I give you: Laser Beams of Love!

laser beams of love wedding inspiration board

Photo Credits:

Profiles in Favor Awesomeness: Kiss and Bake Up

I see so many cake pops in my quest to find the most craveable wedding favors on the planet, and I’ve found some real beauties. But never, ever have I seen cake pops more eye-poppingly amazing than the sculpted treats created by Sarah Downham of Kiss and Bake Up in Exeter, UK.

That’s the lovely Sarah, and that’s no ordinary rose she’s holding. That’s a CAKE POP. Seriously. And that floral confection is just the tip of the sweet, sweet iceberg, my favor craving friends!

Sarah took a break from her cake pop wizardry to answer a few questions about herself and her extraordinary cake pop sculptures. Here’s what we talked about!

FC: How did you get started creating sculptural cake designs?

Sarah: Almost entirely by accident! I started creating cake pops right back when Bakerella popped onto the scene, when I was writing a small food blog, and gave them a try.

I have to admit I’m not an instructural person. I saw the concept of them on the site but went off and had a bash at them myself, experimenting with flavours, ingredients for better texture, coverings etc. Once I made the move from blogger to business, cake pops became very popular. I wasn’t satisfied with just a small shape though, so I began hand-painting, making more shapes, and getting adventurous. It was only in the last year I realised that a lot of other cake poppers were also going into novelties, so, typically of me, I pushed the boundaries.

FC: What’s your favorite source of design inspiration?

Sarah: Without a doubt, cult movies, tattoos and nature. I would happily spend week in and week out developing animals, iconic scenes from movies, you name it.

FC: What’s your favorite cake flavor?

Sarah: My knock-out chocolate brownie flavour for cake pops, it is just perfect. For other cakes, I’m probably a lemony girl, though I make an outstanding carrot and orange cupcake.

FC:If you had to pick a favorite among your cake pop designs, which would it be?

Sarah: That is so incredibly hard. Audrey II from Little Shop Of Horrors was one of the first big adventurous pops I made, and so Audrey II will always have a spot in my heart.

I’m also firmly attached to a lot of my zoo pops.

And naturally Yoda and the Chinese New Year Dragon which both received a great deal of attention from the Internet adorers!

FC: What advice do you have for couples that want to have cake pops at their wedding?

Sarah: Top things to consider, in no particular order:

If you want detail, be prepared to push the boat out for it. Each pop is very time consuming and more expensive than you’d imagine to produce and of course, is hand made, so don’t ask for a discount on a larger order - cake poppers aren’t like factories, it takes the same expense and time per pop, so there is no where to shave savings off of for our customers or ourselves. What may only be a mouthful or two of treat, has taken quite some time to produce, even the simpler pops. You’re essentially paying for edible art.

Always consider how you are going to display your pops. There are stands out there available to buy, but you can easily get creative with larger displays using polystyrene decorating, sweet decorated mini buckets, glasses, vintage teacups, you name it. Its an opportunity to incorporate your favours or dessert into the decor in an interactive way! Make the most of it!

Cake pops are so incredibly easy to theme. I’ve created custom pets for weddings, incorporated the flower themes, even favourite band members and movie characters. Last August we did a Disney themed interactive edible world buffet with different scenes from the bride and grooms favourite movies! Grab any element of your theme and personality and go for it, providing your cake popper with a moodboard and lots of inspiration to get designs flowing that are accurate to your desires!

You can see more of Sarah’s brilliant cake pop artistry on her website, in her Flickr photostream, and on her Facebook page. Also, look for even more astonishing cake pops on Favor Craver today, posted as individual photos for your Tumblr rebloggin’ pleasure!

What Happens When You Disable Flickr Sharing

This is dedicated to some very talented wedding favor designers I’ve found on Flickr in the past few months. I go to Flickr daily to find new photos to feature on Favor Craver, and nothing is more exciting than discovering a new favor designer! But, I never feature a favor on my blog if the designer has disabled sharing.

Favor designers, if you disable sharing on Flickr, I will respect your wishes. I will not share your photos with my Tumblr readers. I will not pin your favor to my Pinterest boards. I will not tweet your favors to my Twitter friends. But that’s a shame, because they’d all love to see your work if you were ok with me sharing it!

When you disable sharing, you don’t disable stealing. If your photo is on the Internet and someone wants to use it without your permission, they will. Instead, disabling sharing tells me that you don’t want to be discovered or discussed in social media.

It’s a big, wild world of wedding inspiration out there, and many couples simply don’t have the time or desire to scour the Internet looking for the perfect details for their weddings. So, they turn to curators like me, who sift through it all and highlight the very best. But, a good curator is not going to share something they’ve been told not to share. If you tell us not to share, we won’t. But don’t be surprised when you don’t get found.

Cake Pops: Tumblr’s Favor-ite of 2011

Of the more than 500 different wedding favor ideas featured on Favor Craver this year, one favor concept emerged as the most favored by tumblr: CAKE POPS!

The cherry blossom cake pops above were made by Mom’s Killer Cakes & Cookies. I posted these beauties on March 24, 2011, and since then they’ve picked up just under 6000 likes & reblogs from the Tumblr community, making them the most popular favors I’ve ever posted.

In October, I found these amazing aqua and peacock floral cake pops by Just Wenderful, and right away I knew I had a hit on my hands! These sweet treats are still racking up love all over tumblr; at last count they had more than 3k hearts and reblogs.

I’ll be on temporary tumblr hiatus until the new year, but I’ll still be sporadically tweeting and pinning, so if you miss me, you know where to find me ;) 

Thanks so much to all of my readers for your follows, hearts, reblogs, and comments. It’s been a wonderful year. Looking forward to a craveable 2012! XOXO

Profiles in Favor Awesomeness: Jon Johnson

Step aside, Handmade Ryan Gosling, there’s a new icon of endearing, crafty manliness in Tumblr Town. Allow me to introduce Canadian graphic designer extraordinaire Jon Johnson, who designed and handmade these lovely custom coaster favors for his wedding guests!

I discovered Jon’s favor project on flickr, where he had posted a series of intriguing process shots of his work on the coaster favors, candy buffet bags, and invitations for his October wedding. Here’s what he had to say about the planning and execution of his DIY favor project.

FC: Tell me a little bit about the favor-planning process you went through as a couple.

Jon: The whole favour idea started with our wedding invitations. My wife Jenna and I went back and forth on the invitation design for awhile, and then I screen printed them myself. Then Jenna started looking around online for favours that we thought would work with everything, but we just couldn’t find anything that was perfect, so we decided to create our own.

We went with coasters because they’re something I print and sell on a regular basis (FC: at his Etsy shop!), and they’re a functional gift to give someone. Chocolate and candies are nice to get, but they’re very common and it’s always cool when you leave a wedding with something you can actually use. It’s also nice to think of our guests using them at home, and remembering our day every time they use them.

We decided to give each person a set of 4 coasters. That’s the number I usually sell them in, and makes for a nice little set. Since the materials are fairly inexpensive, giving sets of 4 was very affordable, but also seems like a decently sized gift, especially since we also had a candy table. (FC: Oh yeah, did I mention Jon made the candy buffet bags too?)

Once we decided coasters were the way to go, we decided to tie them in with our invitations, to help give everything a cohesive feeling. The final coaster design, consisting of two birds, bunting, and a large ampersand, basically let our guests re-construct the primary elements of our invitations.

FC: Do you have any tips to share with couples in the favor-planning stage of their wedding plans?

Jon: My main tip for other people is to personalize it. But, I don’t mean just putting your names on something, I mean choose something that actually has some sort of personal connection to you. In our case, we had a lot of hand-made elements, but since I’m a screen printer, it was important to me to give people something I had printed myself. We appreciate a handmade touch, and our guests all loved seeing so much of ourselves in our favors, and all the elements of our wedding.

Be sure to check out the rest of the photos from Jon & Jenna’s cheerful, handmade, yellow & grey wedding at Ilia Photography. The bride’s sunshine-y cardigan alone is worth the visit!

You can see more from Jon in his flickr photostream, and in his Etsy shop, which features his coasters along with other stylish screenprinted goodies.

Do you know a favor creator that deserves a profile in favor awesomeness? You can nominate your favorite favor maker — from the “for friends only” hobbyist to the full-scale professional — by emailing me, tweeting at me, or using my tumblr submit box. And yes, it’s fine if your favorite favor maker is you ;)

Profiles in Favor Awesomeness: Mr. + Mrs. Favors

Loving the idea of DIY favors and loving the reality of DIY-ing your favors are two quite different things. Of course you don’t want the boring, off-the-rack favors that are hawked on every corner of the Internet, but if you’re too busy (or like me, too much of a craft-spazz) to craft your own favors, it’s hard to figure out what to do.

That’s why I was so excited when I found Mr. + Mrs. Favors on flickr! They create beautiful, handcrafted, and entirely custom favors for couples that want to take a hands-off approach to their favors, but still give their guests a special treat that reflects the couple’s personality and style.

I asked Mr. and Mrs. Favors’ founders, Carrie and Rachel, to share some photos of winter favor ideas with me. I couldn’t be more pleased with what they sent me! Each of these favors exudes personality and holiday cheer without screaming “Christmas!!”, and I just love that.

Mr. and Mrs. Favors uses a completely cute interview process to get the favor-creation ball rolling. It’s a bit like the process a couple goes through before a wedding: you meet cute through their contact form, then your favor relationship progresses with a detailed questionnaire, then you move through the design process and delivery of your finished, totally customized favors. So now, allow me to play matchmaker and introduce you! Here are Carrie and Rachel’s answers to my questions about themselves and their amazing favors:

FC: Tell me a little bit about the holiday favors: your inspiration, your materials, etc.

We always use a variety of materials when designing our favors. Boxes and mason jars are a great way to start and then we just see where our creativity takes us. The holiday favors were inspired by our favorite season… the warmth, joy and love!

FC: How did you get started making favors professionally?

After planning our own weddings we realized how difficult it is to find unique custom favors. Many of the sites out there that supply favors have the same run-of-the-mill items. When you go to a blog or wedding website you see great ideas but it’s difficult to know where to find the materials and the skills to create them. Our goal is to provide unique hand made favors to brides that don’t have the time or skill to create their own but they still want that “blog” look.

FC: What was the most enjoyable favor project you’ve worked on?

We really have enjoyed every project! We just love getting to know each couple and catching a glimpse into their event. If we had to pick one it would be custom luggage tag favors that we designed for a wedding in Dingle, Ireland. We were able to use unique materials and they came out so ADORABLE.

FC: What was the best favor you ever received?

Our cousin’s wedding had a photo booth set up and as the favor you got to take your photo strip home with you.

FC: Is there any advice you’d like to share with shoppers who are planning the favor portion of their wedding?

Our greatest advice is don’t be afraid to ask questions! When you come across websites or shops on etsy many of the vendors are very flexible. Find a vendor that you love and ask them to work within your budget, many times they are willing to work with you to create something unique.

Be careful about do-it-yourself projects! We can’t tell you the number of times we have had panicked brides contact us within weeks of their big day frantically looking for a replacement for a project gone awry. Often times brides go to the craft stores and purchase hundreds of dollars in materials and then are not satisfied with the final product. If you are on a budget and still want a unique look, just order custom favor tags and add them to a box, bag or jar that you purchase yourself. Lastly, feel free to contact us if you have any questions! We would love to help you anyway we can.

You can see even more from Carrie and Rachel in their Etsy shop, or check them out on Facebook.

Do you know a favor creator that deserves a profile in favor awesomeness? You can nominate your favorite favor maker — from the “for friends only” hobbyist to the full-scale professional — by emailing me, tweeting at me, or using my tumblr submit box. And yes, it’s fine if your favorite favor maker is you ;)

Search by Image: A Wedding Blogger’s Best Friend (Part IV)

This is part four of a four part series. You can find links to the previous installments at the bottom of this post.

Part Four: Use Google Search by Image to Track Your Own Content

Now for the final installment in the series! Since Monday, you’ve learned how to use Google’s Search by Image to find the original source of a photo, solve photographic mysteries, and find pics for your inspiration boards. All very handy when you’re curating content for your wedding blog, but what if you’re a content creator?

Google image search is awesome for tracking your own work as it spreads around the web. Now that you know how to perform a simple image search, you should make it a habit to search your most popular or unique image content periodically. After you browse the results of your simple image search and see your images reblogged and praised by your fellow wedding bloggers, it’s time to refine your search.

With an advanced image search, you can focus on finding the sinister variations of “reblogging”: the robotic scraper blogs, the etsy copycats, and the obnoxious “new wedding planner passing off other planners’ work as their own in portfolio photos” (yes, it’s 2011 and this actually still happens).

For this example, I’m going to use a photo from Style Me Pretty, a gigantic blog that no doubt spends a gigantic amount of time battling infringement. This photo is from one of their most popular posts of 2011.

A basic image search for this photo yields tons of hits. Most of them are totally innocent reblogs of the photo. To zero in on problematic uses, I’m going to use the “describe image here” feature to refine the results with text from the original post. Why? In most cases a content scraper will take everything from a post, not just the photo. Also, human bloggers who swipe other bloggers’ content are unoriginal types who tend to copy or lazily paraphrase the original. An image search that includes text from the original post will help catch both varieties of pests.

Here’s the first paragraph of the original post on Style Me Pretty:

When I add that first sentence into the image search, I get lots of results. Again, most are innocuous, but on page two, I find something suspicious. Check out the 4th result in this pic. See how the all of the text is bold? It’s because it matches the text portion of my search exactly. (I’ve blurred out the other results and the link to this site to protect the innocent and shun the not-so-innocent):

Yep, that’s the whole first sentence of the post, and when I click in I see the entire post scraped and reposted on some bizarro website. If that was my post, I’d now have to decide how to deal with the scrape. In this specific case, the offending blog is hosted by Blogger, so I could use Google’s copyright infringement report form to get the post taken down. It’s not always so easy to take down a scraper, though, and often it’s not worth the trouble. If you’re posting a lot of popular content you’ll have to pick your battles or you’ll waste a lot of time trying to chase down robots.

Of course, image search is not the only way to track down your content as it spreads around the Internet — a text-only search yields different scraper results for this post — but it’s a handy tool to wield, especially if your creations are photo-heavy or illustrated.

I hope you’ve found this series useful, and I welcome your comments and feedback! You can find the rest of the series linked below. I’ve also included some recommended reading: more information on using Google’s image search, and discussion & commentary on the legal and ethical considerations of reblogging/pinning photos.

The first three parts of this series:

Further Reading:

Google Search by Image in depth, from Google

“3 Ways to Use Google’s New Search by Image for Link Building” from SEOMoz

“Will Pinterest be sued by photographers like Napster was sued by musicians?” - A blog post by photographer Elizabeth Halford about the mixed feelings professional photographers have toward photo curation sites like Pinterest.

A discussion on Quora about Pinterest and copyright

Search by Image - A Wedding Blogger’s Best Friend (Part III)

This is part three in a four part series on using Google Image Search for your wedding blog. You can find links to the first two posts and check out the topic of the upcoming post at the bottom of this post.

Part Three: Build Inspiration Boards with “Visually Similar”

In the first two posts of this series I focused on using Google’s Search by Image as a time-saving, problem-solving tool, but today I’m going to introduce another way to use it that’s addictive and, honestly, time consuming. If you’re ready to get dangerously lost in inspiration board creation, let’s go!

For this example, I’m going look for photos to use in an inspiration board built around this image from Elizabeth Anne Designs:


I love the vibrant colors and styling of this reception table. Let’s see what I get when I search by image with this photo and click on the “Visually Similar” link in the search results.



Hm… ok… kinda weird. And not terribly useful, unless I wanted to make an anime inspiration board. Apparently I need to give Google more information about what I want to see. When I enter “yellow teal wedding” in the search box, I get this result:


Oh, now that’s more like it! And that’s just page one. There are hundreds of thousands of results for this search. Luckily the first few pages are nice and relevant; I could build an inspiration board from the first two pages of results alone. For even more variety, I can switch around the words in the description. “Teal yellow wedding”, “wedding yellow teal” and “wedding teal yellow” all yield similar but different results, giving me tons of photos to choose from to build a board.

Now you may be wondering, wouldn’t I get these results just by typing “yellow teal wedding” or one of its variations into a regular Google image search? Let’s try that:


That’s a lot of inspiration boards. Pretty, but not helpful if I’m planning to make my own inspiration board. The results I got when I searched with an image are linked to full-size images and tailored to the image I chose to start my board. Of course, if you’re building a board with photos found through image search you’ll want to double check the photos to make sure you’re crediting the right source, but you already know how to do that ;)

If I haven’t lost you down the inspiration-board-making rabbit hole I’ll expect to see you here tomorrow, when we’ll cover how to use Google Search by Image to find where your own content has spread on the web, for better or for worse.

Part One: Find the original source of a photo with Google Search by Image
Part Two: Identify mysterious objects in photos
Part Four: Use Google Search by Image to track your own content on the web