Recycled Mini Bound Book Favors

by Angela
(Harrisburg, PA)

We wanted to do something recycled for our wedding favors because we wanted an eco-friendly wedding. I know a lot of favors get thrown out so they also had to be functional. Making little bound book favors out of recycled papers was what we came up with.

For almost a year we saved paper from junk mail, note paper, office paper and magazines that we'd otherwise throw out. We just threw it into a box. Near the wedding we made a cardboard template, we'd stack many layers of papers under it on top of a cutting mat and then use an exacto to cut the paper out. Once we had a nice little stack we drilled four holes on one end with a power drill.

Then through the holes you sort of weave string through it to attach all the pages together to form a book. My photo shows a traditional way to bind a book with string. We got more creative on some of them, used magazine photos as covers, different colored string, etc. They all looked pretty different since they were from recycled papers. They were about 3" x 4" so pretty small.

We used our books as the placecard holders and inserted bookmarks in them that had the guests names poking out. These were all on a table, so the guests went to the table and found their bookmarked book to find their seat assignment.

It was a lot of work, we made over 60 of these! Well worth it though as they were completely recycled and ended up really cute.