What I Wish I Would Have Known #1

You can easily make your own invitations

When I started looking online for invitation options, I knew I wanted a few things in particular:

• I wanted (my now-husband, then-fiance) TR to design the entire invitation (he's an amazing graphic designer)
• I wanted our invitation to be completely one-of-a-kind
• I wanted the contents of our invitation to be neatly contained within the invitation (the invitation should act as the holder for all of the inserts)

We decided to purchase our invitations through a small boutique. TR designed everything and the end result was pretty stellar, in my opinion. We received TONS of compliments on them.

Here are some pics of our invitations (photos courtesy of Lemongrass Photography):

Now, even though our invitations turned out great, I kept having this sneaking suspicion that we definitely didn't take the cheapest route. In fact, I kinda knew that we didn't even take the moderately cheap route. In reality, we downright took the EXPENSIVE-EST (if that was a word) route.

Here are two solutions I wish we'd thought of:

A) Buying the paper and doing the cutting ourselves. Paper Source has an excellent selection of paper, which we could have ordered directly from their website. After printing (the only part of the process I would NOT want to do myself), we could have had everything cut to size at Kinkos. I don't even want to know how much money we could have saved going this route!

B) Working with an artist on Etsy.com. I love Etsy! Just check out this amazing pocketfold invitation (below) from Crescent Moon Paper. For 125 invitations, this would have cost us $867.50 ~ more than $1,000 less than what we spent! This invitation looks sooooooo similar to our invitations ~ it's frustrating to think we could have had the same result for so much cheaper.

Readers, if you take anything away from this post, it should be that there is ALWAYS a cheaper way to get things done. You just have to be creative and willing to do a little extra legwork.