Save-the-Dates for Only Slightly More Than Zero Dollars
There have been some pretty awesome save-the-dates on The Broke-Ass Bride recently, so I am sharing ours with a bit of humility (but only a bit, because our save the dates are pretty rad):
Depending on how you look at it, our save-the-dates came in waaay under budget, or waaay over budget. Allow me to explain: The original number in our budget spreadsheet for save-the-dates was $200. Folks, I honestly have no idea where that number came from. I think we got that estimate out of some Wedding Industrial Complex-sanctioned book or website. We fell significantly short of that number, thankfully: the grand total was just around $70 bucks.
But I can’t pat myself on the back too much, because I really, really wanted our total save-the-date spending to be zero dollars. There is no greater feeling in the world than typing “$0″ into the “actual spending” column of our budget spreadsheet. I wish Excel offered more text options so I could make the $0 glitter like it was on a fourteen-year-old girl’s MySpace page. Like this: $0
The image for our save the date was 100% free Our wedding photographer is, conveniently, one my best friends, so he’s giving us the usage rights for our engagement and wedding photos. (We are also getting his labor at a STEAL rate. I could—and will—write a whole separate post about how to deal with paying friendors.)
I downloaded that font, Marker Twins, from dafont.com, which is a great resource for free high-quality fonts. I should warn that it is also an easy way to lose hours of your life as you try to find the font that best represents the voice of your inner four-year-old, for example.
I did the design work using GIMP, which is free image manipulation software. It’s extremely versatile and pretty easy to learn how to use, especially if you are familiar with other (outrageously expensive) design programs.
So how did we spend $70? Well, my original $0 plan was to simply email that image to our guests. But I failed to account for the fact that there are still people out there whose lives are not conducted primarily on the Internet, and that demographic accounts for the bulk of my mother-in-law’s guest list. So I had to revert to snail mail.
Which meant printing. We used Overnight Prints. I have almost nothing but nice things to say about Overnight Prints. Let’s get the not-nice thing out of the way: it is a terribly misleading name for a business. It’s like if you named a bar “Sobriety.” [Ugh, I can totally imagine that bar. It would be full of hipsters. They'd have Scrabble sets for street cred but they'd all be short on tiles.] Unless you pay steep shipping prices, you will not get the prints even remotely overnight. But as my mother always said, patience is a virtue. Overnight Prints is really easy to use, and the print quality is fantastic. They almost always have some kind of promotion running, so be sure to search for promo codes!
We also had to pay postage. Postcard postage is cheaper than envelope postage, but with our big guest list that still added up to a little over $30. One mistake I made was not buying extra postcard stamps. I thought I’d never have any reason to use them again! But as it turns out, between my terrible handwriting and other errors, we’ve had over a dozen return-to-sender postcards. If you don’t mind return trips to the post office, don’t worry about buying extras. Our post office is a soul-staining pit of despair, though, so I wish I’d just paid a few bucks for some spare stamps.
While $70 is seventy more than $0 , but I’m still putting save-the-dates in our “budget win” column. We had great results for a reasonable total price, and you know what, people LOVE getting physical mail that isn’t bills. I’m looking on the bright side here.
So am I the only Broke-Ass Bride who needed to print save the dates to accommodate a technologically un-savvy guestlist? Has anyone else experienced a budget win, but still longed for the sparkly zero dollar mark?
-Robin
I took a photograph … (here)
http://thinkingwedding.blogspot.com/2011/01/organ…
It's our wedding date in squeezy Marmite on toast. Easy peasy. I got it printed as a postcard with moo.com with a touch of further info on the back and a space for the address. I can't remember how much it cost but it was about £30. Postage for the STDs was about £20.
We did more or less exactly the same thing, except I designed the postcards using vintage ephemera I'd collected and an old copy of Photoshop, also used dafont's Porcelain and Chopin Script. If you are in the UK, use moo as above post or http://www.optimalprint.co.uk/ they are pretty good! They can do single sided as well as double sided cards. Our invites are on the same theme as the save the dates, it was easy to keep designing when we were on a roll.
I also have a lot of people on my future in-laws side who do not use computers, and even though our guest list is 130, I only purchased 50 postcards (at 60% off on Overnight Prints. Follow them on twitter for great savings!) for the people we truly, really, absolutely had to have at our wedding, and then adding postage only brought my total up to $22.71
I just did my response cards yesterday; the fiance bought an 11/17 printer for his business and I could get the minimum sized 3.5 x 5 size postcards to fit 9 on a page. Using limited color, I knocked out 56 for those on our guest list who aren't in the area or a usual phone call away.
And yeah, scoring free fonts is one of my favorite ways to spend a day!
I did the same thing. I used my remote for my camera and we took our own engagement pics. I edited and added font using picnik.com and I made about 50 postcards for family that doesn't use the internet. The total cost was a little over $50 including postage. We emailed the image of the save the date with the wedding website to our internet savvy family and friends which helped us out a lot.
I'm currently trying to figure out how to do the same thing with the invitations!
HA! It's like if you named a bar "Sobriety" – HILARIOUS. They look great!
I did something similar, I used Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop to design and modify a photo my friend took for us. We used Gotprint <a href="http://(http://www.gotprint.com)” target=”_blank”>(http://www.gotprint.com) to print the postcards. The printing prices for 4×6 in double-sided postcards are cheap and they also give you the option of using recycled paper. The downside is you may have some extra postcards if you did not need 100 of them, but I plan on using them to decorate for our wedding. Postage was about $30 and for the postcards we spent about $40 which is not that bad, so roughly $70 altogether.
For our invites we are using paperless post <a href="http://(http://www.paperlesspost.com)” target=”_blank”>(http://www.paperlesspost.com). They have awesome invitations that look very similar to real invitations. I invited a few friends to join the site and was able to get enough postage for all of our invites. We purchased $8 in coins (you use 1 coin every time you send a letter/invite and for extra design embellishments) through the site. For those that are not computer-savvy we are just calling because they are relatives who would prefer a phone-call anyway–they are very casual when it comes to invites. Pinng.com (http://pingg/com) has free evites. They also will mail copies of the invite to people if you prefer. My fiance and I chose not to use the site because we had a hard time finding a design though that matched our colors/theme.
For those of you designing invites/Save the dates I encourage you to check out aviary <a href="http://(http://www.aviary.com)” target=”_blank”>(http://www.aviary.com). It is a free photoshop like program on the internet. Also, check out bluevertigo <a href="http://(http://www.bluevertigo.com),” target=”_blank”>(http://www.bluevertigo.com), they have tons of links to free fonts, vectors, etc. I used this site a lot for our save the dates.
We used postcards from Vistaprint.com. Granted, we wound up with FAR more than we actually needed (the minimum was 200, and we only really needed fifty), but the total for the cards alone was about twenty-five dollars.
Our Save-the-dates were $0! It feels soooo good to not have to pay for them. Not even a stamp!
Here they are: http://www.nickandalexia.com/
We did something similar! We used http://www.123print.com and got 100 postcards for $24. We used one of our engagement pictures, my future MiL designed the front and most of the back, and our photographer/my friend designed a logo (for free) for the back. We mailed 50, so that was about $14 in postcard stamps. The printable address labels were $10. I thought it was a great deal, especially because we have leftover address labels and Save the Dates! (Can't figure out what to do with the leftover cards … would love to hear how kebbiel plans to use her extras to decorate.) And, we hear that people love them!
Alexia ~ Your video is so cute! How did you make it?
We are having a relatively big wedding ourselves although 200 is considered small fries for Asian weddings. We spent about $45.00 for 60 Save the Dates. We sent Save the Dates to head of households and skipped the elders (they don't speak English much less go online) We used the free personalized mad men inspired save the date provided by Wedding Chicks. We spent about $27 for printing at Uprint with the special promo and $5 for 50 vellum envelopes we got on sale at paper and more. I used left over postage stamps we had around the house plus an additional $8.75 more stamps. I had to buy a few extra envelopes and the magnets for the Save the Dates for $5.
We also used moo.com and chose the smallest card size (like a business card) with our pretty pattern (later used on handprinted invites) on the front and our text on the back. Was really easy to design on the site. Cost about £12 for 80 ish. Then about £6 on envelopes and £15 on stamps! Total under £25!
Brilliant as always
Thanks everyone for all the information! I can't wait to get started!
These are great ideas to save money for Save the Dates!! I've been dreading what the cost would be but you all just inspired me to keep searching for deals!!! Keep up the great ideas! They are helping people like me!!
I love that picture. You guys are ridiculously cute. I'm impressed with your $70 save-the-dates. Between ink cartridges, magnets, envelopes and stamps, we ended up spending about $80, which was a lot more than the $0 I had budgeted, too.
I love that picture. You guys are ridiculously cute. I'm impressed with your $70 save-the-dates. Between ink cartridges, magnets, envelopes and stamps, we ended up spending about $80, which was a lot more than the $0 I had budgeted, too.
On the bright side, we used the leftover envelopes as our invitation envelopes, we had enough ink to print all of our other stationery (including the photos we used in the luggage tag project), extra stamps for our invitations, and free fonts from our artist friend that we've used on everything, and some leftover magnets that we can use to make photo magnets with wedding and honeymoon pictures later.
Waste not and all that rot.
I'm just about to start making mine. Thanks for all the tips!
A friend drew the pictures of us and my fiance animated it into a video (he's a motion designer). I really didn't have much to do with it.
I'm sure that any motion design student would love to make something like this for free (he/she could add it to their portfolio).
I got away with about $50, including postage. I am having a medieval themed wedding. When designing my save-the-dates, I enlisted the help of my graphic artist mother. (I would have done them myself–she's a wonderful teacher and I've learned a lot about Adobe Illustrator from her–but it was quicker for her to do it. And since I'm planning the wedding myself, I'm willing to use and abuse anyone who offers their time!
We found a gorgeous pic of a castle and I picked my favorite picture of me and my fiance. Mom 'just threw together' a design that I absolutely loved! I tasked my fiance with getting them printed. He took the design to FedEx Kinkos and we had post-cards the next day for about $35.
One caution to other brides-to-be….check with the post office to see what actually qualifies for that cheaper post-card postage! The size limit for those stamps is smaller than you think!
Very creative! We're getting married in May and trying to decide whether or not to use snail-mail or email. We're working on save-the-date pics and footage this weekend. Thanks for the inspiration!