Bride & Geek: Save the Date, Invitations, and other Stationery
Stationery can be something that adds a lot of hidden, unforeseen cost to a wedding — or at least I’ve been told by countless blogs, journals, magazines, and other wedding-related sources. Because Dan and I are paying for most of the wedding ourselves (with generous help from his parents), we don’t want to spend money where we don’t have to. Getting professionally made invitations can cost hundreds of dollars, and people can get caught up so easily with upgrading paper types, adding foil and embellishments, and so on. Before you know it, your $125 invitation budget is gone and you still haven’t even gotten RSVP cards!
That’s why I decided to print my own Save the Date cards and wedding invitations. Thankfully, Dan had no qualms with this. Originally, we went to Hobby Lobby to look for wedding invite stationery that we could print on; they had boxes of 25 blank invitations, envelopes, and RSVP cards and envelopes for $25 each, which is a great price. Dan and I are sending out between 30-35 invites, however, which means we’d need to buy two boxes. There’s $50 right there.
This is still a good price, but after thinking on it, I decided that I’m going to return the printable invites to Hobby Lobby and go a different route by using the same process I did to get our Save the Date cards printed: VistaPrint.
I have a Pro Advantage account with Vista Print, which cost me nothing and lets me upload my own designs for free instead of their usual $3.99 fee. Vista print lets you add a back side to your announcement for free if you print it in black and white (and since our back side was just text, that’s perfectly acceptable to me), and they offer a variety of different upgraded papers for a small fee. Plus, all of their announcements and invites come with free white envelopes. Not too shabby! For our Save the Date cards, I wound up choosing the included matte cardstock because 1) it was cheaper and not as important as the invitations themselves, and 2) we already posted the Save the Date on Facebook, so the printed versions are mainly for people not on Facebook, computer illiterate, and so on.
After everything, 30 Save the Date cards, with envelopes, came out to $18.00. This was actually higher than what it could have been; I chose expedited printing and shipping, so the cost was more. If I had used the regular 2 week processing and shipping (which I will be doing for our invitations), it would have been just under $13.00. This is a great reason to plan ahead — I could have saved five bucks, dude! Of course, we had to wait for the Rabbi to finalize our wedding date with us, so waiting until the last minute for Save the Date cards was a must.
The cards arrived on Friday and they’re pretty sweet! Sure, they may not be as fancy as some other wedding Save the Date cards I’ve seen out there, but they are definitely nice enough for me to be happy with sending them out. Sometimes printing online can be a big gamble, but we had friends that used Vista Print to make their invitations, and I’ve made business cards with them before, so I knew it would be okay. This did, however, teach me that for the actual invitations, I need to pay to upgrade to the thicker cardstock as the Save the Date cards were printed on something more like your average business card.
Overall, I’m pretty happy, and we’re both very excited. We just finished addressing the Save the Date cards this past Saturday, and we even have a few left over in case we decide we want to make a scrap book.
I can’t wait to show you the invitations I made; they’ll make your geeky hearts sing with geeky joy! But, alas, I’ll have to wait until after the wedding for that; after all, as much as I appreciate all of you, my loyal readers, I can’t afford to feed you all at our wedding!
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