Wedding Appointments!

I made appointments last week to meet with an invitation printer, T&N Printing, a local place here in Charlottesville, as well as MS Event Rentals.  My mom and sister came along with me to meet with them and I am SO thankful they did! The first meeting was to get pricing and information on invitations. I have created my own invitation suite (invitation, RSVP, program/menu) on Pages (I have a Macbook Pro).  Back in September I planned a baby shower for my best friend. I had her party package printed at FedEx/Kinkos and they did a good job, but it was quite a hassle and very expensive. I have purchased her package from Etsy and thought I could do a pretty good job making my own suite for my wedding. I also couldn't find exactly what I wanted from the online retailers such as Wedding Paper Divas, Invitations by Dawn, etc. 

I had expected that the price would be pretty high, although I knew from some recommendations, that the quality would be great. I was thrilled with Nikki quoted me an insanely reasonable price to print the invitations. The paper quality was great and they wouldn't have to charge me a set up fee based on my design and quantity.  I can't say enough about how nice they were and how helpful both Nikki and the owner of the company were to us. 

Our next stop was to MS Events.  We got there a little early and I am glad we did because what I was expecting to be a short, 30 min meeting ended up taking 2 hours!!!!!!  It was so exhausting and overwhelming! I wish I had known going into it that the appt would last that long. I would have been more prepared with ideas and snacks!! :)

I had intended to just look at chairs and silverware and glassware to get an idea of pricing and options that might work for our budget.  Instead it went through the whole shebang of rentals for everything. Linda was very nice and did have some good suggestions on decorations and logistics.  There are so many options for where to put the bread and butter plates, where to put butter (pats of butter on the plates? small scoops of butter in ramekins? Butter on the buffet line?), and on and on.  My amazing mom and sister were so great to sit through that with me as well, they certainly didn't know that it was going to be that overwhelming.

A friend of mine gave me tickets to the UVA vs Notre Dame basketball game and I was able to take my sister which was a welcome relief after such a stressful meeting. I had planned a whole thing of going to lunch with my mom and sister after going to MS Events but since it took so long I didn't have time before getting to the game.  UVA came off with a win too!

Valentine's Date Night In!

 Many thanks to our photographer Tyler Corvin for sending us a date night gift of a netflix subscription, popcorn and candy! We wanted to do something low key for Valentine's Day, especially since it had just snowed a lot and we were going out the next night with our friends to celebrate my birthday.  We made fajitas, which is one of our favorite meals to cook since we can make a vegetarian and chicken version :)
We watched Hitch and snacked away. Thanks Tyler!

wedding websites

There are lots of great budget friendly options for wedding websites. The Knot, WeddingWire both offer free websites that are pretty customizable and include templates that make setting up your site quick and easy.  They are searchable for your guests to find you easily as well, and include links to your registries to simplify and streamline your information. You can also consider setting up a blog to record and document your wedding planning experiences and have a section there for your wedding details.

I put together a site on wix.com for our wedding website, which looks like this:  

Note: our location and last names have been blurred out, they are there in real life so it doesnt look as weird.

This website was a lot more time intensive as I customized every tab and the layout of every box and text component on the site. This also gave me a lot more flexibility though so I really think it looks awesome.  The basic site is still free, although it has .wix.com in the web address.  You can pay a small fee to not have that, but of course when you are on a budget, does it really matter that much? No.

DIY Bridesmaid Cards

I had seen some really adorable ways of asking your bridesmaids to be part of your wedding.  There are so many cute ideas involving boxes filled with tank tops and ring pops to print your own cards.  I wanted to do something special, but that was budget friendly and age appropriate (I am 30 after all…).  I felt like the cigar box filled with goodies was bit young, I didn't think my bridesmaids would need a sequin tank top for anything and I knew that mailing those would be crazy expensive.  I settled on these cute cards.

I only have three bridesmaids so I think I used just two pieces of teal, two pieces of white, and one pieces of navy blue card stock. I cut teal card stock into 5x7 pieces and then cut white card stock just a little smaller.  I then cut the dresses out of navy blue textured card stock (it had small raised dots all over it).  I punched out the flowers for the mini bouquets using a starburst punch I had gotten from my friend who was selling creative memories.  I used a regular hole punch to punch through the two card stock pieces up at the top to tie the ribbon.  I used double sided tape from Creative Memories to assemble everything and then wrote on the dresses with a silver sharpie. I found a "love" stamp in the dollar bin at Michael's and used a leftover pad of ink that I had from my best friend's baby shower in September to stamp the envelopes (also extras from the baby shower).

I then waited until I saw two of them to deliver them in person.  My third bridesmaid lives in Colorado so I did end up mailing hers :)

Pretty cute, huh?