Make your own eco-friendly seed bomb favors

My wedding is based on eco and environmentally friendly themes so when I found Mademoiselle Chaos Blog on making seed bombs, I thought it would be perfect for our wedding favours. They're very easy but quite messy to make. It took me and my other half about two and a half hours to do in terms of time. It was great fun and we really enjoyed making them.

Here's what I needed to do in advance:

I was drying flowers — native species — in my microwave to go into the favours to add to the texture and colour.

I did a lot of research into the best paper to use, so when we were throwing out our recycling I was keeping the better quality, mostly white, paper, so that my favours weren't grey (which is what happens if you use newspaper). Even my old to-do lists for our special day went into the mix.

Then we got our hands on an old blender — many blogs online strongly recommend you don't use your expensive kitchen blender for this as it is heavy going and can burn out the motor.

I researched the best seeds to get. I wanted something which was going to be in flower in August (when my wedding is) and was going to be beneficial to the butterflies and bees, native to Britain, and seed well. I ordered my seeds from Naturescape. I got 100g which was the smallest amount and I have sown some for decoration on the day.

In terms of quantities, I did approximately 100 sheets of paper and used approximately 40g of seeds and I made 133 seed bombs.

Here's what you will need:

• paper: approx 1 sheet per favour
• shredder to shred your paper
• bowl
• bucket
• jug
• warm water
• native seeds (I used 40g for approx 100 favours)
• dried native petals: I used tea leaves, coloured tissue, glitter, food colouring (these are all optional)
• cheesecloth, or muslin, or thin tea towel
• ice cube trays: semi soft silicone variety worked best
• a tray or two (to dry favours on)

Here's how you make them:

I shredded the paper. I saved around 100 A4 sheets and covered the paper in warm water and left it to soak overnight.

We took two small handfuls of soaked paper and added warm water until it covered all the shredded paper. Then we whipped it up in the blender.

We blended it until it looked like the above. We did batches of paper until we had filled our bucket with pulp. We then blended the petals, and added them to our bucket with the seeds and mixed well.

Then we strained the pulp through a tea towel. We put the towel over a washing up bowl to catch the water, which we then use to water the plants.

We gathered up the edges of the tea towel, and twisted and squashed to get the water out of the pulp.

After squeezing the pulp looked like this.

We pressed the pulp into the ice cube trays. As we pressed, a bit more water came out.

We carefully pressed the bombs out of their trays and rested them on a board to dry.

Hey presto — your seed bomb favours!