This DIY Race Car Candy Jars has been sponsored. #RaceDayRelief #CollectiveBias

We went to a wedding once with a full out Venetian hour. It was in the same room as the cocktail hour -- with just as many items. There were fresh baked cookies, chocolate-dipped bananas, wrapped chocolate, cotton candy, s'mores, and a funnel cake maker.

Okay, I may have imagined that funnel cake maker.

What I didn't imagine was the waiter who was handing out to go boxes as soon as you entered the room.

There has been nothing -- no moment before or after -- that I've loved more about a wedding reception than that. For weeks after, I was telling anyone who would listen that I wanted a dessert-only wedding. That's not a thing (although it should be!). So I compromised and we had a candy bar. It was a hit and such a tasty end of the night treat.

Now, what if you're a race car fan and want to incorporate that into your wedding in a subtle way? Easy! Create a "Final Lap" candy bar with our DIY Race Car Candy Jars.

DIY Race Car Candy Jars

I'm obsessed with these candy jars. They came out better than I could have ever expected.

DIY Race Car Candy Jars Supplies:

• Mason jars
• Spray paint
• Candy
• Toy race cars
• Adhesive dots
• Scrap paper

How To Make DIY Race Car Candy Jars:

As with every project you spray paint, you want to bring the items (in this case, the two pieces of the mason jar lids and the race cars) outside. I always go into our woods behind our house to spray paint because of the open air -- and the pine needles. I don't worry if any of the spray paint ends up on them.

Tear your scrap paper into two pieces, one for each color spray paint.

Put the pieces of the lid and cars on each sheet, then spray paint. Allow the paint to dry and then apply additional coats as needed.

The silver went on with just one coat. Then, I came back and resprayed because I missed a few spots. The blue is three coats. So, of course, I was wishing I went with silver for it all. But I like the contrast of multiple colors. Just don't overspray. You don't need the same amount for each color.

Let them dry completely (I left them outside in the sun for a few hours).

Fill the jars with candy. You can pick wrapped candy, candy in your colors, your favorite candy, whatever you prefer.

Add a piece of adhesive dots on each wheel of the race car. I used half a dot per wheel.

Put the metal lid on the mason jar, then close it with the metal screw band. Then, stick the race car to the metal lid of the mason jar.

You have two options when you display these at your candy bar. You can leave out plastic treat bags and let your guests help themselves, like they would at our candy bar, or you can get smaller mason jars and fill them for your guests. Then, let each guest take one home at the end of the night.

Either way, you probably want to keep a bottle of fast acting Advil® Film-Coated handy. Your guests will be dancing all night and instead of them making a "pit stop" to their chairs, you want to keep them on the dance floor! If you have some Advil® Film-Coated around, it'll get them back boogieing quickly. The Rapid Release Formula goes to work in minutes on tough pain* (*Among OTC pain relievers.).

Just don't display your Advil® Film-Coated at your candy bar. You don't want people to mistake Advil® Film-Coated for candy.

You can pick it up -- and all your supplies for these DIY Race Car Candy Jars -- at your local Walmart. Even better, you can print an Advil®  Film-Coated Coupon before you go so you can save. And don't forget to check out the Ford Ecoboost 400 in Miami on November 20th.

BRIDAL BABBLE: Would you make these DIY Race Car Candy Jars?

Love race cars?
Check out our DIY Checkered Flag Escort Cards.

Wedding DIY: Candy Buffet Part II: Candy Bar Math

This is Part II in our candy buffet series. Be sure to check out Part I here)

A Bride On A Budget received the aforementioned candy in this post from SweetWorks. Additional candy, containers, and miscellaneous items in this post did not come from SweetWorks. All thoughts and opinions belong to ABOAB.

When we were planning on doing a candy buffet at the wedding, I searched far and wide to find candy bar math. There were no posts. The Internet is really devoid of any real life wedding experience to really let you know how much candy you need if you do want a wedding candy buffet.

I'm here to change all that.

We worked with the candy brand SweetWorks to help with this post. You can shop SweetWorks to purchase the items that we received for this post.

Since you'll want your candy buffet to match your wedding, you should definitely shop by color. You want this to be an extension of your wedding, and making sure everything is the same color as your wedding will help.

Candy Bar Math

In total, we ordered about 40 pounds of candy for just over 100 guests. That's 2.5 guests per pound or about 6.4 ounces each, give or take. In the end, I'm going to say that our guests ended up taking about 4 ounces each, but that's because we did have some light candy. If you are going with chocolate only, account for closer to 7 ounces per guest. As far as variety, I would say start with four types and then add one for every 10 guests (so five types for 20 guests, six types for 30 guests, up to 14 for 110 and then just stop there and start repeating. And, actually, you can find this many varieties at SweetWorks, so that's one stop shopping. And yes, different colors of items do count as different varieties).

Candy Buffet

From SweetWorks, we received:

• Shimmer white doves sweet shaped candies
• Shimmer white bells sweet shaped candies
• Purple 1-inch gumballs
• Shimmer lavender 1-inch gumballs
• Shimmer lavender .5-inch gumballs
• Foiled solid milk purple hearts
• Foiled solid milk silver hearts
• Silver pearls
• Shimmer lavender pearls
• Foiled solid milk purple balls
• Shimmer lavender Sixlets
• Dark silver croquettes
• Ovation milk almond break-a-part balls

Because our items were shipped in bulk, everything we received came in bulk bags (except the break-a-part balls). Less packaging, so that's good.

My favorite was the dark chocolate croquettes. I think I did too good of a job telling people how amazing they were because the last time I saw them was when I was packing these items up to bring them to the venue. I never saw them again after that. Everyone had taken them all.

Our colors were eggplant, lilac, and silver, with a pop of white, so I made sure to order items in those colors only.

We ended up with 16 containers of varying sizes (you can check out full details on those items here). The four largest buckets (9" x 5.75") were filled with chocolate. Those went completely.

We fit 446 purple foil balls (about 5.5 pounds), 234 dark chocolate croquettes (about 4 pounds), and 261 chocolate hearts (about 5 pounds) in each container.

The medium sized buckets (4.5" x 5") were mostly filled with wrapped candy. See, the galvanized buckets are not food safe. So, for the ones we did fill with food, I put a plastic sandwich bag in first. It fit perfectly. I didn't have to cut the edge or anything.

We filled them with: 42 large gumballs (about .75 pound), 40 lollipop sticks, 191 small gumballs (about 1 pound), 120 sugar sticks, 1866 sugar pearls (just over 1 pound), 521 Sixlets (1 pound).

In the small plastic buckets (3.25" x 4.25"), we used: 138 white doves, 857 sugar pearls (.5 pound), and 312 white bells (the doves and bells are maybe half pound, but those are the only ones I'm really guessing on).

Plus, four break-a-part balls. (And we stopped there because we ran out of room on the table)

We tagged each item with its name so everyone would know what items were in which containers, and we added shovels and scoops. My mom said we really only needed them for the unwrapped candy, but I added one to the wrapped row in the back, just for aesthetic purposes.

I wasn't around the chocolate buffet until the end of the night, so I can't tell you the order of which things were taken, I just know what was left at the end. And it wasn't chocolate. That was gone, almost completely gone. The other items had extras that didn't fit in the buckets that could be used to refill them, but all the chocolate was put out at the start. And at the end of the night, there was hardly any left. The Sixlets were completely gone too, including the leftovers that didn't fit in the bucket. My uncle and his sons are in love with Sixlets (which are a candy-coated chocolate-flavored ball) Almost all the lollipop and sugar sticks were taken too. And don't even ask me how quickly the break-a-part balls were snatched up. I can't find a single leftover gumball, but I sorta think someone took those at the end of the night all together. I don't think the guests added them to their candy bags as much as my remaining candy would lead me to believe. The containers with the white doves and bells were almost empty, but we didn't put out as much of that as the others. And the sugar pearls weren't touched. So, I would stay away from those (even though I'm a huge fan of the sugar doves and bells and have been enjoying the extras) and I would stick with more chocolate-based items.
We had large bags for people to fill and personalized stickers for them to use to close the bags. We had the band make an announcement that the candy bar was available for a late night treat and I even had it added onto our menus (we had one at each place setting). I don't know anyone who didn't head over to the candy buffet to grab some for the road. It really was a huge hit.
BRIDAL BABBLE: What is your favorite candy?

Wedding DIY: Candy Buffet (Part I: Buckets)

This is Part I of our two part candy buffet series. Part II is here.

A Bride On A Budget received some items for the purpose of this post. All thoughts, opinions, and additional items belong to ABOAB.

We were setting up a candy buffet at my apartment a few days before the wedding. I needed to get everything set up, counted, labeled, and numbered so that the buffet could be set up the way I wanted at the reception.

"Why are you doing a candy buffet anyway?" my dad asked.

"Because it's the trendy thing to do," I said.

It is. Candy buffets are really trendy and they're not something that was popular a decade ago. There are tons of ways to do candy bars because they're still new, but most of the candy buffets I've seen focus on glass apothecary jars. And those are fine, but to me, they're so rigid and formal -- completely the opposite of a candy buffet. Plus, they're expensive (and slightly useless after the wedding). So I wanted our candy bar to be something different.

We had a beach-themed wedding and our wedding favors were a silver galvanized bucket that was decorated and filled with wedding buttermints. I wanted our candy buffet to parallel the favors and keep with the beach theme.

So instead of glass apothecary jars, we went with silver galvanized buckets, plus some smaller hibiscus flowered buckets (which matched the hibiscus flowers we had on items in the welcome bags and on our invitations).

We ended up getting the following items from Oriental Trading for our wedding candy buffet:

4 Large galvanized pails
1 package Large galvanized buckets (comes as a dozen)
1 package Hibiscus beach play sets (comes as a dozen)
3 packages Clear gift bags (comes with 50 per pack)
1 package Purple candy sticks (comes as 80 per pack)
1 package Purple filled candy straws (comes as 240 per pack)

The reviews of the hibiscus play sets said that they were small, really small. But I didn't listen. Each bucket set came with four tools, including shovels and scoops. I thought that shovels would be so much cuter for the buckets instead of plastic candy scoops. I never thought that the small buckets would have really small scoops. The scoop was almost exactly the same size of my ring finger.

I put some candy in the bucket and then tried to size the scoop and shovel. The shovel was okay with me because I knew that the candy would be higher and this would be fine. But the scoop was too small. I needed to use it only for the bucket sets.

My kitten, Totes McGotes, agreed.

So I decided the shovels would be for the silver buckets and the scoops would be for the hibiscus ones. There was also another major difference between the two: wrapped candy would go in the galvanized buckets and unwrapped candy would go in the plastic buckets.

The galvanized buckets aren't food safe, so they needed wrapped candy only (or, small secret about tomorrow's post: we actually lined the medium buckets with plastic bags so that we could put unwrapped candy in them and not worry about anything).

I realized that's why people use apothecary jars. They're glass so they're food safe.

But I was slightly stubborn when it came to wedding planning. I wanted what I wanted and was going to make it work. So silver buckets that are very beach wedding oriented. Yup, that's what I was doing.

Tomorrow's post is going to be about candy and candy buffet math, but I did want to mention the candy that Oriental Trading sells. If you don't want to sit and think about what you might potentially need, you can pick up a candy buffet assortment pack. Choose from blue, pink, purple, and white. It's $69 for nine pounds (and, according to my candy bar math that says you need four ounces per guest, that's enough for 36 guests).
If you aren't using one of those four colors as your main wedding color, don't worry. Oriental Trading's candy buffet page shows that you can pick up candies in virtually any color. Choose a color and you will see every candy that is available in it. There are lollipops, gumballs, fortune cookies, even chocolate covered sunflower seeds. Even better, those sunflower seeds (plus many other products) can be personalized for free.
If you don't like the plastic bag approach (it's what I liked best), you can go with organza bags, takeout boxes, or super cute bride and groom satin and tulle favor bags. Whatever the style of your wedding, you can find something that works. Just don't forget about a way to close your containers. Ones like takeout boxes come with a folding top, but bags need something like stickers (that's what we did) or ribbon. You can get both from Oriental Trading. Everything at Oriental Trading is really high quality and really low price, so you can pick up everything for your candy buffet for less than the cost of a couple glass apothecary jars.
BRIDAL BABBLE: Do you prefer glass apothecary jars for wedding candy buffets or do you think other containers work?