Just kidding. Mostly. We really have a lot taken care of! Okay, so what has happened since I finished school and last blogged. Has it really only been one month? Wowza. Here's a quick rundown of the past month: Ben surprised me with some amazing graduation parties, we helped my parents get some stuff done to get their house ready to sell (Sad. But exciting for them! Go here to check it out and buy it!), we put the invitations together and sent them out, we found an apartment and Ben moved into it (I will move in after we get married in 44 days!), we booked our honeymoon plane tickets, the honeymoon plane tickets went down by $150 each (lesson learned: after booking tickets, RESIST THE URGE to check the prices), we started our premarital counseling, I have been applying for all kinds of jobs, I moved in with Kevin and Helen (yay roomies! Although I am not here very often!), and we have gotten a lot of wedding stuff figured out.
house church friends met us at Benihana for a surprise dinner for me! Then later that weekend,
surprise party #2 at my parent's place! <3
First let's talk about the invitations! My roommate (former! sad!) Megan did an amaaazing job on them and designed some beautiful pieces for us! After finally finding the right paper and envelopes, and changing our minds about a million different things a billion different times (sorry, Megs!), we finally got stuff printed. I don't even know how that happened, she had to like change the alignment and rotation and blahdy blah designy things, but she got everything printed.
Then we went to this place in Beaverton where we got them all cut. For $15. Seriously. We could have literally spent HOURS cutting each invitation from the page. They did it in 5 minutes. (Of course, Megan had printed crop marks on the papers which made it possible for them to cut in the right places!). Highly recommend doing that if you DIY your invites. Save yourself the time, stress and lost appendages and just get it cut somewhere! They just charged us the shop minimum since there were so few papers (compared to the normal quantities they deal with).
So after gettting them cut, we spent an evening putting them together. Ben and I had a pretty good assembly line going and we really got things done pretty quickly. We had gone back and forth on using an RSVP card, but finally decided on having one. We went with a Mad Libs style RSVP, which has been so fun! We found some samples online (yay Pinerest!) and combined them to create the wording we wanted. We did it postcard-style and the front of the card had the actual mad libs with a place for the guests to fill in their name (more on that later). The back had our address and a place for the number of guests. Since we have limited space, we filled in how many seats we had reserved for them, then allowed a place for them to fill out how many would actually be attending. We didn't want people bringing their cousins and brother's girlfriends, or things would get quickly out of hand. So we had to be kind of specific. Now, here's the issue we had with the Mad Libs portion. I was afraid people were going to send the cards back without actually filling out the Mad Libs and wouldn't fill in their names, so we wouldn't know who was coming or not. After going back and forth, I decided to fill in the names ahead of time on most of them. On those who we allowed to bring a "guest," I just wrote a number that corresponded to their name on my Excel spreadsheet instead of filling out the name so I would still know who it was. I am pretty proud of myself for this, because we have received some without names, but I still knew who it was.
We still hate that we weren't able to invite EVERYONE that we wanted. Although not many people have RSVPd yet, so maybe we'll get to invite more after all... (If you are reading this and received an invite but haven't yet RSVP'd, please do so!). Anyway, now we are awaiting the responses and working out all the other details! More to come on that later!
Here is a list of resources we used for the invites:
- Paperworks.com for paper bag-colored paper and matching envelopes. Cheaper than anywhere else and really great quality paper! We paid a little under $50 for 100 sheets of cover-weight paper and 150 matching size 10 envelopes, with shipping included.
- We also got some paper from Michael's (less than $4 for 100 sheets of paper bag-colored cover-weight paper, but the color wasn't quite right, so we used that for the RSVP cards) and from Paper Source ($5ish for 10 sheets of paper....which was too light anyway besides costing way too much, so we used that for the little registry tag).
- Amazon.com for the lace ribbon and twine we used to tie everything together (that link will take you to the specific ribbon). The ribbon was really pretty and good quality. Not quite as soft as I imagined, but it still looked beautiful and wasn't too bulky in the envelope. I also ordered a small hole punch from Amazon since the twine we used was really thin, it would have looked weird with a normal-sized hole.
- The US Post Office, clearly. The invites themselves didn't weigh too much, so by weight we could have used just one normal $.45 (or whatever postage is...) stamp. But because the ribbon we tied made it a tiny bit bulky, they had to hand-process them which cost an extra $.20 per invite. So glad Megan suggested we go in to check about postage before buying stamps/mailing them, we would have gotten a lot of things returned....! We also bought postcard stamps for the RSVP cards (again-going to the post office to make sure our postcards were an appropriate size to not have issues when mailing!).
All in all, we didn't need that much material and the time it took to put them together was really low! Megan spent more time designing them than we did putting them together I think! We spent a total of
about $225 on the invitations, including all materials and postage. We made about 120-ish inviations, but have the materials to make more. We actually have a ton of paper left, which will be convenient for programs!
