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Lately, I’ve been obsessed with DIY wedding stationery. Not only is it a great way to stick to a tight budget, but what better way to give your guests a sneak peek at your wedding style? And whether you’re going the print-at-home kit route, or cutting blank cardstock for your own creations, your invites don’t have to look plain. It’s easy to use decorative elements to pack a punch and add a bit of personal flair. After all, your wedding should be your own!
The source of my inspiration is this lovely invitation envelope. While the paper itself is your standard white and brown, it gets prettied up with vintage-style stamps and a touch of lace, both of which are easy to achieve.
Let’s start with the lace edges. The practical side of me wonders how the delicate lace on the outside envelope would hold up in the mail. A nice alternative might be to use paper doilies instead — you achieve the same effect, but with more strength. And did I mention doilies are super cheap? (You can find packs of 30 for about $2-3 each.) If you need a little direction on how to cut and position the doilies, here’s a great DIY tutorial.
On to stamps. While there are plenty of custom postage designs on the web to choose from, they require a little more dough than you’d spend at the post office (usually double or more). And when you tally up all the stamps you’ll need to buy — for save-the-dates, invites, reply cards, and thank-you cards…well, let’s not get into how much all those custom stamps would be! That’s why it was refreshing to find that the pretty stamps on the inspiration envelope can be purchased through the post office…at every-day stamp prices. Yay!
Featuring pretty herbs, you can mix and match these 29-cent stamps at your pleasure.
If vintage and flora aren’t quite your style, the “Love: King and Queen”designs are a good bet, and less ho-hum than the Wedding Roses and Rings designs.
Or maybe you’re an unconventional bride, and you’d rather have and “pretty” isn’t a concern to you. With an open mind, you’ll find the post office carries many other choices. You might like something a little quirky, like the Mark Twain design, or even American Scientists. Neat!
How are you making your stationery special? If you’re going the DIY route, what special touches do you think you’ll add?
The original title of this post was “My Wedding Invitations: A Horrifying Accounting”, but when I started adding everything up I went past a very scary number (it starts with 5 and rhymes with “fun dread”). I immediately closed my spreadsheet with horror and washed my hands and brushed my teeth.
I spent HOW MUCH on invitations? WHO AM I?
I thought I was a budget-savvy practical bride, playing left tackle for Team Wedding Sanity. Wasn’t invitations on the lowest extreme of our budget priority list? How did this happen?
Well, friends, I went down the wedding rabbit hole, and wedding paper got the best of me.
I remember when I’d read other engaged people express their “love” for paper goods, and snicker. Really. Who loves paper? There is a reason that The Office is set at a paper company: because paper is so boring it is funny.
But as you all know, getting married brings on a whole mess of nonsense. Everything that isn’t important is, and contrary-wise, everything that is important isn’t. In Wedding Wonderland, your color scheme becomes as vital to your identity as your spiritual beliefs. The debate over fondant vs. buttercream rages like we’re talking about evolution vs. creationism. Even for people like me who are not having a cake! [For the record: I am a fondant apologist. This is part of the reason we are not having a cake.] And paper somehow becomes something to love and spend hundreds of dollars on.
So I went down the rabbit hole to Wedding Wonderland and I spent way too much money on my invitations.
I caved to my inner four-year-old and bought those pocket envelopes. I couldn’t resist shimmery metallic paper because my wedding colors are mixed metals. I bought a freaking $20 embossing gun and four different kinds of embossing powder until I found an acceptable shade of copper (I had some scary run-ins with my nemesis glitter in this hunt). And so. many. stamps. in search of the “right” swirly flourishes. As though swirly flourishes can be wrong.
I made expensive mistakes. Even though I ordered samples and made a mock-up invitation that satisfied me at the time, after I’d already ordered and cut my card stock I decided I absolutely could not abide using that color for the invitation backing. So I ordered a different color card stock and ate the $30. The first return address stamp I bought was too small for its print to be reliably legible. I had nightmares of my RSVPs all getting lost in the mail, so I ordered a new, bigger (and more expensive) address stamp. With rush shipping. I threw so much money down the rabbit hole at these invitations the Mad Hatter and the March Hare are constantly making it rain.
Was it worth it? Well, my invitations still aren’t in the mail, so I can’t show them to you yet. I think they are lovely, but honestly? I’d rather have something a few hundred dollars less lovely.
So learn from my mistake, freshly-engaged broke-asses. Sometimes things you think you don’t care about and will be able to save tons of money on somehow weasel their way into the splurge category. Plan accordingly with budget buffer. Or, you know, have a stronger constitution than I do so you don’t get caught up in wedding nonsense.
Have you found yourself caring (and spending) more than you ever would have expected on something for your wedding? How did you save your budget from spiraling into nonsense?
I knew that DIY-ing my wedding invitations was going to be a substantial undertaking. And I knew that the paper to make over 120 invitations would stack so high as to shake the conscience of anyone who has ever enjoyed the shade of a tree or syrup on pancakes or breathing oxygen. But I tricked myself into believing the invitations were a suitable use for all that tree pulp, because they were oh so pretty and celebrating our love and la-la-la I can’t hear you crying, mighty forest, because you don’t actually have a voice to sob or eyes to tear.
Still, I was not prepared to confront the trimmings from our invitation paper. A Broke-Ass does not abide waste. And here I am, only halfway through cutting our invitations, and I’ve filled a hat box with larger pieces of excess card stock and a shoebox with the little slivers I trimmed off to attempt to correct all the rough or slanty cuts I made on the first try.
So I’ve been brainstorming ideas for how to use the paper trimmings from my invitations. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:
For the larger pieces:
My first thought was wedding-friendly uses like place cards and labels for the dessert table. Unfortunately, our printer won’t take such small pieces of paper, so I’ll have to convince someone whose handwriting doesn’t look like they currently are recuperating from two broken arms to write out that stuff on these scraps.
I’m always looking for scrap paper when my buddies come over to play a game of Celebrity. Wouldn’t it be awesome to play on linen-finish gold cardstock instead of the backside of whatever solicitation is at the top of our mail pile? My only concern is that my friends will try to class up the celebrities they put in the bowl to match the paper, so instead of having three Ke$has in the bowl we’ll have a bunch of European royals. And I have no idea how to mime Queen Margrethe II of Denmark.
Similarly, I suspect I’ll dramatically improve my diet if I start writing my grocery lists on some of the biggest scraps. Because it’s hard to imagine besmirching such nice paper with items like “snack cakes” and “ramen noodles.” I’d probably end up buying a lot more fresh produce.
Then again, I have a least one low-brow idea for my extra fancy paper: a small stack of card stock is surprisingly effective as a shim. My favorite local dive bar has ridiculously uneven tables. Maybe they’ll poor me a free beer if I wedge some cardstock under those table legs to level things out for them?
And for the small slivers:
If you can handle additional cutting (and if you can, you have a stronger constitution than I), with these little slivers you’re halfway to wedding confetti.
If you’d rather vent some of your frustration out in a constructive manner, how about using these extra bits of paper as kindling the next time you go camping.
Or better yet, line your pet hamster’s cage with the slivers.
Or mix it in with your shredded financial records to thwart would-be identity thieves.
I’ve seen people DIY bird nests out of strips of paper. And I’ve seen people use bird nests in their weddings, for some reason. Unnecessary birds are just part of the absurd zeitgeist of this nascent decade. If you’re hip to bird fever (the cute trendy kind, not like, the avian flu that kills people) this could be a great way to use those extra strips of paper and alleviate your guilt about killing so many trees that could have provided twigs for actual birds to use to build their nests.
Anyone else horrified by the waste from their wedding paper projects? Did you find any creative ways to use your scraps?
It’s the last Friday of the month, which means it’s time for me to take questions from YOU. Here we go:
Dear Liz:
I have a large family, 2 sets of parents with all the usual aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. My future husband’s family is smaller by far. I am close to 10-15 family members and want to make sure they attend our wedding. Recently at a family function, one side of my family that I’m not very close to asked the where, when, etc about my wedding.
Of course they all wanted to know when their invites were coming and I did not say anything to make them feel they would not be invited. Now I have to re-plan my festivities for 94 instead of 45-50. Is it possible to “un-invite” family?
Courtesy of Kenny Backer Photo
Signed,
Flummoxed at $79.95 a person
Dear Flummoxed,
The good news is that you haven’t actually invited them, yet.
If I were you, I’d take this list of, Good Lord, almost 50 extra people to your parents, and see what they think. Be honest – say that you’re not that close with the extra half-hundred (!), and weren’t planning to invite them before the fateful get together. Mention the added cost a couple of times, the destruction of desired plans, and try to narrow down the list to whomever they feel has to be invited. That is the ultimate nice way to do it, if only to avoid your parents or loved ones having to answer the question, “Hey, how come I didn’t get invited to Flummoxed’s wedding?”, any time soon. <gulp> The next nice way to do it is put the unwanteds on a “B” list, sending them invitations only when you’ve got acceptances and rejections from your primary list. Or, you can just not invite them, but that might not be possible on a personal or political level. Choose whatever will stress you out the least. But if you feel you need to invite some of them, I’d start with your parents.
I know that it’s hard to know what to say when put on the spot like that (ugh) but for those of you who might face a similar situation with similarly presumptive people, practice this response, “Gosh, you know, we haven’t gotten that far in the planning, but yeah, we’re really excited, thank you so much! So, how’s (change of subject related to them) going?” Gall bladder surgeries, new houses, new puppies, anything having to do with whatever you know about their lives, and go with it.
Courtesy of Kenny Backer Photo
Hi Liz,
I’ve been wondering when the bride and groom usually check into their wedding night hotel? My wedding will be in Santa Barbara so I will be staying at a hotel the week before, but my fiance and I wanted to stay at a different location on the night of our wedding. My wedding day is starting to fill up with hair appointments, makeup, photography, etc, and I’m just wondering how I’m going to make time to check out of my current hotel and check into my new hotel, especially given check-in time restrictions. What should I do?
Signed,
The Road’s Not Traveled Yet
Dear Traveled,
The first thing I do whenever there’s a problem is find out exactly what I’m dealing with. Call the hotel that you’re staying in before your wedding and explain the situation. Standard check-out is usually 11am, with check-in available at 2 or 3pm, but find out what the latest checkout time is that you can get. Then give your wedding night hotel a call, too. There usually isn’t a specific time that you have to check IN, just when you CAN – but make sure. See if there is there a way that you can check in remotely, by phone call or online. After that, it should just be a matter of getting your stuff over there. Are you taking a car/being driven/able to hide your suitcases somewhere in your venue? My wedding planner duties sometimes include transport, and always include an assistant who can drive, so if you have a planner, ask. If not, you’re just going to have to store it where you can and remember to put it in the getaway car before you take off. Ask someone to remind you. Moms are very good at that job.
Courtesy of Kenny Backer Photo
Dear Liz:
I’m the mother of the Groom. Although the bride’s parents are paying the majority of the wedding costs, my husband and I are taking care of the bar and the wedding flowers, along with the rehearsal dinner. The problem has been the invitation wording. My husband and I wanted the invites to include our names as well, as in “Mr. and Mrs. Robert and Karen Jones and Mr. and Mrs. Thomas and Jane Simmons request the honor of your presence at the marriage of their children Sarah Jones and Charles Simmons.” Her parents seemed to resist this, at first, but agreed to it. As a compromise, the wedding rehearsal invitations will say “join us” as opposed to naming my husband and me as hosts. Is this proper etiquette, or have we overstepped, given that they are paying much more towards the wedding than we are?
Signed,
Paid and Proper
Dear Paid,
I think you’re okay. There are two invite wording standards these days: Either the bride and groom invite everyone (Sarah Jones and Charles Simmons request the honor of your presence at their wedding) or the bride and groom, along with their families (together with their families, Sarah Jones and Charles Simmons…) invite everyone. But the wording on your children’s invites is used frequently too, as a way of involving both families, especially since both sides will have guests of their own at the wedding. In other words, it’s a good way to avoid a potential guest opening the invitation and thinking, “Wait, who?” I can see where your discomfort comes in financially, but you should give yourself a break, seriously. The rehearsal, the flowers, the bar? These are essential things. You know, especially the bar. Thumbs up from me.
What do you guys think about these questions? I’m curious if anyone has run into “Miles” problem, and how they resolved it. Let me know in the comments. Bring it!
Annie at Thriftfulness tipped me off to her adorable, DIY and dirt cheap wedding save-the-date cards which she made using rubber stamps!
She detailed the how on her blog, so check it out! What a great and easy craft that can be used for all sorts of wedding-y goodness, right?
Have y’all heard of “light painting“? It seems like all the new rage, and its being used to make some pretty effing rad save-the-dates by you crafty readers!
Laura + Chase put Chase’s mad skillz to use and created this edgy and creative light painting postcard save-the-date for 100 guests for $55 total! You can learn more about how they did it here (and check out some of Chase’s other cool work while you’re at it). Don’t you just love this?
Melodee + Kris got in on the light-painting action with this cute, short and sweet save-the-date video, using Kris’ mad video techniques and the help of some family and friends!
Kira + Kyle sent in their playful and adorable save-the-date with a great reader tip! “I’m a graphic designer and artist so I designed our save the dates and had them printed at printpelican.com for about .40 cents a piece, and after envelope and postage each save the date ended up being about $1.00 a piece. Print Pelican was the only place I was able to find on the internet that could do the square magnets that I wanted and did it for much cheaper than most of the other printers that could only do rectangles.” Check it out:
Elena + James kept it simple, sweet, and affordable by laying some Vistaprint discount code action on a photo from their engagement session, and got their save-the-dates out to 50 people for less than $30!
Brooke + Toon’s creative video showcases stop-motion and their personalities in an adorably charming (and literal) way.
Nick + Rebecca’s movie poster save-the-dates such a fun twist on the norm! They worked their broke-ass brilliance and had their friend Sean design them for free in exchange for the graphic design experience, and they printed them at the vocational school for only 50 cents each! Holler!
This one is my favorite:
I’m so proud of y’all, rocking your broke-asses like gangstas! Brings a proud tear to my wee, bionic eye.
Did you make something for your wedding that you’d like featured? Send it in, yo!
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?
Part of the winning package for the Lucky in Love Contestants included a set of custom wedding invitations. Since Dan and Marquina were only responsible for the printing fees, we worked on a suite that fit into their budget.
The invites were designed to be economical and efficient and we choose to treat the RSVP cards as a postcard, eliminating the need for a second envelope. It also gave us an opportunity to add a map of the area where the wedding took place, Red Hook, Brooklyn, which can be a bit hard to navigate for those not familiar to the area.
The top card featured the main invitation. On the backside was an angular pattern influenced by the industrial feel of the venue. The bottom card had a detailed map of the area. This card was one and a half the size of the top card. It was perforated at the end, where the RSVP card was attached. Guests were instructed to tear off the RSVP portion and mail back. The backside of the map featured driving directions and parking directions.
Thanks, Kimberly, for sharing so much delicious (and do-able) wedding inspiration! We’ve loved hosting you this week! Come back again soon, y’hear? (photos by Casey Fatchett Photography)
Our amazing sponsors Storkie have just introduced an exciting new line of save-the-dates and wedding invites that we just couldn’t wait to share with you guys! There’s something new to suit everyone’s aesthetic tastes, from of-the-moment to utterly timeless. We’d be totally remiss if we didn’t show you their elegant wedding invitations, their adorable save-the-dates – and here’s something you might not have thought of – rehearsal dinner invites! And the party doesn’t stop at wedding stationery, people! Storkie can hook you up with everything from birth announcements to themed party invitations – there’s a beautiful Storkie invite for any event that’s truly worth celebrating!
Catherine, my gorgeous and talented friend (aka stylist-extraordinaire behind The Life Styled) shared her save-the-date video with me and I just about died. It’s freaking brilliant. And funny. And so so smart.
“Why won’t you just pick a font?!?” LOL.
Then Jerry wrote in, to share the m-fing RAD save-the-date card they made using their kitchen wall, some chalkboard paint, chalk and a whole lotta creativity. Its just too charming and cute. I can’t take it. (and the unicorn? I die!)
Jerry wrote: We used our kitchen wall as the canvas, and with a can of chalkboard paint and and eventual handful of broken chalks later we were able to come up with this. Everybody loves it and says that it captures our personalities… …We aren’t the “frolicking through a garden” photos kind of couple, so I wanted something that would capture our personalities. The unicorn is an inside joke that started when I announced during our Thanksgiving prayer how “Dana (my wife’s name) is more magical than a unicorn”. I have always done all of the birthday invitations in the family, so I knew that sending these to be printed at Walmart.com was the cheapest way to go. I did some research and found some hard 4×6 acrylic frames with magnets and mounted them for way less than the 4-5$ estimates per unit that I was seeing online. Many people don’t even realize that the lettering was drawn out on the wall, but I ALWAYS make sure to let them know….its my emotional reward I guess.
And then there’s Molly and Max, who shot their hipster-meets-hippie-meets-happy save-the-date video, guerilla-style at a flea market in San Diego. I love their choice of music and their editing style. Really I just totally want to have a drink with these two. Uh, oh. Sound the alarm… Its a full-on couple crush alert!
We LOVE getting to gawk at and share your wedding goodies, so keep ‘em coming! Your creativity and moxie inspire our balls off, you know that right?
Herbs stamps – Roll of 100, $29.
