Marrying someone in healthcare? How about a Rx for looove

by tacocat
(midwest)

My fiance is in the final year of his pharmacy doctorate program, so I thought of filling Rx bottles with jordan almonds for the favors.

Even though everyone does almond favors nowadays, my family is Sicilian so we're going with the good authentic candy :) None of the glossy hundred-ingredient junk from the craft store.

I figure since this is going to break down to about 60 cents/favor, all supplies factored in, I can afford to be just a bit snobby here. You can use any candy you like and probably get away even cheaper.

First I tried this out with a few bottles of various sizes I had at home and determined that a 13-dram will fit 5-6 almonds, which is just right. A $45 5-lb box of candy will easily make 130+ favors, plenty for my wedding.

The bottles are easily available online; even though the minimum quantity is twice as many as we need, it'll still only run us $20-30 (unless he can arrange to get some cheaper through work, that is).

I also need to call around to local pharmacies and see if they can hook me up at a discount. At first I thought of asking everyone I know to save their old bottles, but even if I manage to collect enough, I don't know that cleaning each one of any drug residue and removing the original labels would be worth the trouble.

We're making our own labels with names/date and some cute words or maybe the old legend about the symbolism of the almonds. The labels are small enough that a bit of clear packing tape serves just fine to laminate them on the cheap.

My mom is into crafts & scrap booking, so she has fun gadgets like a Xyron machine which can turn anything into a sticker, giving us lots of options on how to decorate/label the bottles.

We're also on craft store mailing lists to get coupons and sales ads, so it won't be hard to get our supplies at low costs, and we already have quite a bit of usable stuff lying around from old projects as it is.

There are also websites where you can get the whole shebang ready-made for you - customized labels, filled with candy and all - but there are limits compared to what you can do on your own, and anyway it's cheaper and more fun to make them yourself.