We sent our wedding invitations out last week. Happy to have that one checked off the list. It’s quite the chore getting people’s mailing addresses. Email addresses? No prob. Mail? Uh, people still mail each other things?
For our STD’s (that’s wedding lingo for Save the Date – not the other thing) we did an email since we had so many emails on hand. When we sent the STD email we asked people to reply with their mailing addresses – and it worked!
We’re super classy and did our photos for the STD on my iPhone. I know – looks so pro, right?! We thought it was cool – and set the tone for the wedding. Happy, fun and casual. After a few weeks of gathering mailing addresses I was finally able to mail out our formal invitation.
We tossed around the idea of just emailing a wedding invite – but decided it would be a nice personal touch to mail something…if it was affordable enough.
We’ve already discussed that wedding shiz is super pricey…well, invitations are no exception. Sure, the more you pay the fancier they are…but, we’z no fancy folk. We’z casual.
So, I consulted one of my favorite websites, ESTY.com. I found a graphic design shop that would customize the design and email me the high resolution file for a grand total of $15.00. The shop I used was great, and they made the few minor changes I requested. I had the file in a few days and all I needed to do was print!
I could have printed everything at home, but I knew I would need envelopes so I used another favorite site – Vista Print! I was able to print 150 invitations on good quality paper with 170 envelops for under $50.00. Score!
Hand addressing the envelopes was not high on my list of wedding loves…so, I exported my Excel File into my Word Label Marker and I had them ready to rock in 5 minutes.
Postage is expensive, and since we have a short turn around we decided to have people RSVP (per an inserted instruction card) to a gmail account or my cell. We saved on printing the extra response card, and return postage! Win.
Moral of the story folks, if you put in a little effort you can save yourself a lot of money on this wedding stuff. It’s silly how much we could be paying if we just did everything theknot.com was telling me.
The Merfett 