In Full Swing? ~> Saving a Bundle

Every bit of information you've ever read about men not being as interested in planning their own wedding as you will be is mostly true. Coming to terms with that, I decided to stop waiting on the FH aka Mr. H to finish compiling his list before I got over some hurdles and disposed of some necessary evils. 


First order of "bidniss", our website. I'm the design chick and so much more comfortable with a computer than I am with actual humans (what?), that I knew I could knock the early stages of this task out of the box with little to no input from Mr. H. Being the research and comparison shopping maven that I am, I decided to go with eWedding for our site. As frugal as I am, I did opt for a package and got our own domain. I've always been generally annoyed by this: http://www.website.com/INSERTYOURUSERNAMEHERE and http://INSERTYOURUSERNAMEHERE.website.com. Not that there is anything wrong with that type of web address, it just gives me an itch when I'm behind the site. Not surprisingly, eWedding has some pretty nice features (that I would have built in with code on my own) included in the packages. Big plus!


Now onto the stuff I've been DYING to share!



 Knowing that we have a general figure for the total number of guests we are inviting to this shindig, I took the initiative to start looking into pricing and printing options for our STDs (save~the~dates). Going into the search, I hoped to find something budget friendly, but still resigned myself to the fact that if I didn't, I would simply DIY them. After over two hours of adding things to shopping carts/shopping bags/invoices/and plain old carts to get to the ACTUAL costs, I got tired and just typed in free postcards. Can you all guess who popped up in the sponsored results? VISTAPRINT! I spent the next ten minutes hitting myself for being so absentminded. I had used them for more than one simple project and always the free offers and paid only shipping. So I decided, let's see what VistaP is workin' wit (ha!) It didn't really matter what the templates were, if I didn't like anything, I could just open my handy dandy GIMP program and create something then upload it and voila! I had to stop myself from doing that because I remembered something. We are each about the goofiest people our friends and families know, if I get all stuffy and formal on EVERYTHING in the planning of this wedding, it will come across as (and will be) super ungen. We simply are not stuffy and uber conservative people. With that reasoning in mind, I decided on something fun and dare I say...cute for our STD. The wording is still pretty formal to kinda let folks know that it won't be an all out goof fest, but also that we don't take ourselves so seriously that our manners are rivaling the monarchy. Here's what I ended up getting;


Front

Back

                                      

So all in all, I got 100 free postcard STD's (twice!), 200 in total. Anyone who doesn't know how to get a second free order and wants to can send me a private email through the Talk to Me page. (Wouldn't want to negatively influence our impressionable young brides~to~be! winks) I paid a little less than $7 in shipping on each order bringing me to around $13 for 200 cards! The postage for mailing each card costs more than the cards themselves at just under $40. As I said, I could have DIY'd these, but after figuring costs for the paper, printing ink, and other materials... I beat DIY's butt on this particular task. I saved myself and Mr. H a gang of money and most importantly, time. <~ cheesin' at that! So our STDs will be here in 21 days, all glossy and pro looking and I'll have knocked out lots more tasks in the meantime while someone else does the heavy lifting. Hoo-rah!

I didn't think I'd be as lucky with the invites though I gave it a shot and I was right, no go on elegant AND free! However, I started out looking for invitation papers and found some places I'd be happy to pass along to all you proud DIY recessionistas. The first place, Invitation Paper, is wholesale to the public and they have many choices. I looked at a few of the options pretty hard but could not settle. They really have some great designs, especially this one:

           image courtesy of Invitation Paper Co.

I'm a sucker for almost anything damask inspired. So give them a looksie. The pricing isn't too bad, although the product descriptions take some getting used to (a small thing). The next site I looked at was Double U Paper, and when I say they are a wholesaler, I mean bulk. They are super budget friendly, although to me some of the best pricing was found attached to some of the plainer styles. There are, however, loads of choices, here's a random one:

 image courtesy of Double U Paper Co.

I love calla lilies by the way. For this particular shop, bulk gets the deepest discounts (and by no means is anything else they have on tap overpriced).  That particular style is $25.74 for 250, invitation and envelope. All the little extras are sold separately but c'mon! You can get actual samples from either site and for now, I don't know about their business practices so if anyone decides to use them let me know, I would love to recommend either of these to other couples I do design work for. 

This post is getting lengthy! 

Anyway, the creative juices wouldn't stop flowing, so I decided to give one more site a look. I  figured that since I lucked up on a sponsored search result why not try again and what did I see but Zazzle. I like coincidental familiarity. I remembered one of the great blogger brides over at Get Married using a picture from them in one of her posts. None other than Rachel (aka PINKLOVEBIRD)! I have to say, I fell in LUUUURVE with this site! Being the creativity glutton that I am, and also loving shaving labor and money off of tasks, I decided to see if any of the other users had created anything that "spoke" to me and what I was trying to achieve. There was an abundance of damask, damask in black & white, damask in black, white, & pink (our color theme). But nothing that "spoke' to my budget after adding up the total costs. I finally dug my heels in and got to work digging through my "computerized craft box" and created my own. Scored on design, time saved, and price! You can take a look at our invitation here. What makes Zazzle so great is that you can personalize this design and purchase it at a deep discount. Ours is simple and totally un-stuffy and in the near future (very near), I'm going to turn that design into an entire wedding suite with RSVPs, table cards, place cards, the works! So stay tuned.

Also, if any of you brides like the pricing and experience of getting your own stuff made just for you, but don't have the time or believe you don't have the creative chops to DIY using Zazzle. Give me a shout over on the Talk to Me page and I'd be happy to create a suite for your wedding as well. Send me your ideas and I'll hook a sister up!

Well...I think I've just about gushed to death over all this and am at terminal velocity on this post. Stay tuned for upcoming posts about my CRAZY registry experience and some tips on how you can save yourself the trouble!

SO...What did you all do to save money on your wedding paper products and stationery? Any sites or places you are as stoked about as I am about Zazzle? Talk to ya soon...