Tuesday, September 30, 2008

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.

Greetings!

Hello! My name is Lindsey and this is my first official post to my blog! I am the owner of Bustle Event Design ~ a brand new event design company serving Indianapolis, Indiana, and surrounding suburbs. The reason I am starting this blog is because I read SO many event-planning/wedding-planning/creative blogs via my Google Reader, and I am constantly inspired by the ideas, pictures, & do-it-yourself projects in these blogs. I want to share my inspiration with you, as well as share my journey as a new event designer.

For my first couple of posts, I'd like to share with everyone what I wish I would have known when planning my wedding. I was married in August 8, 2008, and planned the entire thing. TR (my husband) stepped in a few times to design our invitations & programs and help me choose the food for our reception, but other than that, I was the sole planner for our wedding. I discovered wedding-planning blogs just a few months before our wedding, and it was then that I realized I could have saved a LOT of money and included many more personal touches had I known about these blogs back when I started to plan my wedding. Discouraging as that may be, now that I am an event planner, I will be able to use the tips & tricks mentioned on the wedding-planning blogs to help me plan amazing weddings for other couples!

On the sidebar for my blog, you will see a list of my favorite wedding/event/creative blogs. If you are planning a wedding or other event, check them out! I promise you will not be disappointed. Stay tuned for my list of what I wish I would have known when planning my wedding...