Chalkboard Wedding Matchbox Favours

These wedding favours are so easy and so cute! Although my tutorial is how to create chalkboard-style favours, you can create any design you please, to suit your theme or colour scheme. These add a beautiful and thoughtful touch when placed on tables, and it's a nice touch to look after guests who are smokers, but they are lovely to hold tiny favours too!

One word of caution - if you do use them for matches, ensure these are not placed on any table the kids have access to!

You will need:

• Matchboxes
• Full-page printable shipping labels
• Access to a printer (inkjet or laser is fine)
• Access to a computer running a graphic design program
• Knife and ruler

First, measure the top face of your box. I will be creating two faces, one each for the top and bottom of the box, leaving the striking areas uncovered so that the boxes are still functional. Even if I weren't using them for matches, I would still leave the striking areas free, because I want these boxes to still look like matchboxes, but you can create a wrap-around design if you prefer.

Create artwork to suit your wedding theme or colours in the software of your choice. Ensure that the artwork is the size of the matchbox face you just measured.

If you want chalkboard artwork: paste in a chalkboard background (these are easily found online). Next, add in the text and images of your choice. I chose to keep mine fairly simple. The font I used is chalk hand lettering shaded, which can be downloaded free (for personal use) from dafont.com. Do remember that your artwork will be printed fairly small, and because it is white on black any fonts or flourishes you use will need to be fairly bold in order to stand out. I initially tried detailed designs that looked great on the screen - but all of the detail was lost when it came to printing.

Next, you need to add multiple copies of each face to a single page so that you can print them with ease.

Once you have done that, print the number of copies you require onto full page shipping labels. Use whichever printer you have to hand, though I find that photocopiers / laser copiers give the best result, it is a case of using whatever you have access to!

Once they are printed, you can cut out your labels. A knife and ruler is best, ideally you want to cut without too much pressure and 'kiss cut', that is, cut the top printed layer without disturbing the backing layer. If you have to use a nail to get the sticker off, you risk cracking the printed colour.

Once you have cut the labels, carefully apply them to each side of the matchbox. Your matchboxes are complete! I hope you like them!