Wedding Wednesdays!

Today I want to focus on the STDs (no, no those) and Invites!

Like any other woman with an internet connection I had been pinning anything related to wedding that I liked. This included a very cute DIY save-the-date. 

I am not a DIY type of person. I don’t like to do crafts or put things together. I’m generally more of a writing type of person but it was a really cute idea and I was so full of Wedding energy that I had to do it. The results weren’t as good as I imagine they could have been, but I am happy with them.  

By mixing acrylic paint and dish soap I created a “scratcher” (like lottery tickets). As you scratched off each heart you would reveal the month, day, and year of the wedding. I used blank invitation/thank you cards from JoAnn’s and hand writ everything else. I found the little diamond stickers on sale for a dollar so I included them on there as well. Because I figured some people wouldn’t understand what to do I wrote up instructions which I taped to the back of the card just in case.  

In order to make the hearts I had to hand trace about 100 hearts and then paint them with the mixture above. I had to do several coats of paint in order for them to cover the number well enough (for my standards, and they tend to be high).

Unfortunately I heard from several people that they were unable to figure out what the date was. I don’t know if it was me or them, but there was a lack of understanding the STDs. Nonetheless I think they looked very nice!

Since my engagement is so short (about 5 months) I had to start planning for my invitations right after I sent out my STDs.

Early on I set a budget of $5,000 for the wedding. Although we could technically afford more than that, I knew we would be buying a home and having many expenses when it came to that so I didn’t want to over do it on the wedding. By the time it came to pick the invitations I had already put aside money for the ceremony ($700!), food ($1000) and other big ticket items. Let me tell you something right off – invitations are EXPENSIVE! All the ones I was finding cost over $1 each. Even though I only needed about 35, I wasn’t going to spend $1.50 per invitation, another $1 for each RSVP and then each envelope. So I turned to Google and Facebook.

Facebook wasn’t so helpful. I was given the suggestions of making the invitations myself by hand or printing them out on my own computer. As I said before I am not a crafty person and I get frustrated easily, especially if what I want is not perfect. That basically cut out any idea of making the invitations myself (especially after the STDs didn’t work out as well as I hoped). Google gave me a much better result!

I discovered Invite Shop. This website offered invitations that were to my liking and that had a price that made them affordable.

When looking for invitations I knew that I didn’t want anything formal or traditional. I wanted something modern and in your face (although if you want something more traditional they have that, too). One night I pulled up the website so that Thomas and I could go through the different designs and decide on the one that fit us the most. We finally agreed with this one:

Isn’t it a beaut??

This site lets you customize the invitation as much as you want. You could change the font, the color, the location of the text and designs – basically you could do anything you wanted to. The original version of the card was brown but I changed it to blue to match my wedding color. These invitations were only .89 cents each! Can you believe it!

After deciding on the invitation we had to pick an RSVP card. Thomas and I went through those and Thomas decided this was the one he liked the best, even though it did not match the invitation (and he refused to have it be blue):

I like the RSVP card as well (.49 cents/each), although it probably wouldn't have been my first choice. I did some editing and moving things around from the original as well. Hmm I just noticed that on this version (Which is the download the site gave me) I have the "unable to attend" line but on the ones they sent me it's not there. It's not a big deal and I didn't even realize it until now. The only other thing on the RSVP that I would note, is that the frame is uneven in the ones I received. In other words, the black area around the card is thicker on the left than on the right. When I showed the card to others no one noticed it so I didn't bother complaining. 

Here are the actual ones I received - notice the RSVP frame.

This is how they looked when I mailed them.