Signed, Sealed, Delivered

Good news:  invitations officially went out yesterday!

Bad news:  we had to spend way more than we had anticipated on postage.  :-(
After assembling an entire mock invitation, we weighed the invite on a digital home scale - exactly 1.0 ounces.    PERFECT!  So, we moved forward and assembled everything and had it ready to go.  We went to the post office to buy stamps and send the invites on their way.  The worker suggested weighing one invite just to be sure because they looked heavy.  It turns out that our invitations weighed 1.05 ounces!!!!  That meant we had to jump up to the $0.65 postage for each one.

Moral of the story:  Don't trust your scale at home.  Bring your mock invite to the post office.  We could have easily rearranged and cut things down to get down to the 1 ounce mark and we would have saved $0.19 per invitation.


Ending on a positive note:  INVITATIONS ARE DONE AND IN THE MAIL!  Now time to wait patiently for the RSVPs.

Invitation Suite is Set

Way back in January (Wow!  That feels like forever ago) my fiance and I bought two Vistaprint.com Groupons.  Shortly after buying the Groupons we used one to buy our wedding invitations and inserts.  Now, since we finalized our menu for the reception, we went back and used our second Groupon to buy our RSVP cards and our Thank You cards.

I can't believe the deal we got.  We ordered 100ct. of everything in our stationary suite and paid only $85 for all of it including shipping (and including the cost of the Groupons).

The only downfall to using vistaprint for your stationary is that they don't have outer envelopes.  They include ordinary white envelopes which I think will work just fine for inner envelopes, so I just need to find outer envelopes to use with our invites.  I also think we will tie everything together with some cute purple ribbon or something along those lines.

Here's how everything turned out.  On the left is our invitation, in the center is the front and back of the RSVP card, and on the right is our invitation insert and the front of our Thank You folding cards.

If I Had $100

...to spend at American Wedding, I would be very happy.

American Wedding is currently running an engagement photo contest.  You have to hop on over to their facebook page and post an e-pic.  You can vote on any number of photos by 'liking' them.  The contest runs now through March 8, the picture with the most 'likes' is the winner of the $100 credit for American Wedding.

With that said, don't miss out on your chance to win!  Head over and upload your photo.  Also, if you'd like, you can check out my photo here (and give it a 'like' if you're feeling generous  :)  ).    Good luck to everyone that enters!

Stationary Steal!

So we officially ordered the first part of our wedding invitations (we don't know meal choices yet, so we didn't order the RSVP cards).

Here's what we did order though:
100 Custom Invitations with 100 white envelopes
20 Extra White Envelopes
250 Custom Business cards (Used as Invitation Inserts)

Total cost:  $32  (No that's not a typo!)

A little while back I bought the Vistaprint Groupon - $17 for $70 worth of credit.

While the Groupon specified that it couldn't be used with other promotional codes, it didn't specify that it couldn't be used with sale prices.

So after buying the Groupon I designed our invitations.  Then  I waited and waited and finally the site had a 50% off sale (yesterday).  A note to you on that:  Vistaprint is changes their sales on a daily basis (i.e. starting yesterday invitations were 50% off with the upload fee for images waived, today they are now 20% off).

After adding everything above to my card my total came to $64.  However, when I added the Groupon, the costs nearly doubled.  The 50% off went down to only 25% off.  I ended up calling Vistaprint and they explained that the Groupon couldn't be paired with other promotional offers.  But being as stubborn as I was, I didn't give up.  After they realized that, they offered to take the new cost (which was still 25% off), applied the Groupon to it, and then took half off of that price.  They also offered me free shipping (which I had expected to pay another $9 for).

Moral of this store:  Vistaprint has awesome deals and great customer service.

More to come:  We have two Vistaprint Groupons (I bought one and my fiance bought one). We plan to use the second one to buy our RSVP cards and Thank You's.  We'll see how using the Groupon works out the second time around.

Also here is a peak at the invitations and inserts.

Front and Back of Invitation

 Invitation Insert