Take Caution with Kohls

          Forever ago when I first started reviewing various store registries, I ended with Kohl's as one of my top picks.  So we went with it and registered at Kohls.  Unfortunately, we've experience a lot of difficulty with our registry their.  One by one items on our registry are becoming "no longer available" and then disappearing off the registry.  And they don't e-mail to keep you updated on these items either.  You will only notice the items missing if you go on to their site to manage the registry.  Yesterday I created a registry on Amazon.com and went through to find many of our 'missing' items on there.

        Moral of the story:  while Kohl's wedding registry has great perks, their inventory changes so frequently, that you need to constantly update your items and/or find some items elsewhere.

Tablescaping

I have two pieces of stationary that I plan to have on the table:
My i Spy cards:

and my menus:

My concern was overcrowding the table.  I wanted to put two of each card on the table, but that would mean 4 different cards on the table.  

Then, I was given a brilliant suggestion (which I don't know why I didn't think of myself) put the two cards back to back in one holder (since they're the exact same size).  Instead of having 4 single-sides pieces on the table, I will only need 2 double-sided.  

Right away I went to search for holder for my stationary.  I found a great deal on these menu clips on amazon.  I ended up paying $11.89 for 36 holders (after a $5 Swagbucks giftcard).  They're perfect, simple, and have a cast iron base so we don't have to worry about them falling over!

Photo Booth Fun

We've had so much going on that I almost forgot to mention that we are officially having a photo booth at our wedding.  I wanted one so badly, but after getting some price quotes it was completely out of the question.  However, we found a deal going on at  Complete Albany and could NOT resist.  We are only paying $300 for 2 hours of photo booth rental - which includes sales tax, photo booth with operator, unlimited pictures, unlimited prints, scrapbook, thumb drive of images and props!

Now we just have to decide where we are putting it and what time we want to have it for.  I am thinking of having it for the last 2 hours of the night to provide some more entertainment in case things start to die down.

  

RSVP Arrival

After sending out our invitations the other day, I couldn't wait for the RSVP's to start filling up the mailbox.  We received our first RSVP this past Saturday (only 3 days after the invites went out!) and we received several more today - it's so exciting!

In total, we ended up inviting 149 guests to the wedding.  According to a statistic that I read in my Brides magazine, about 85% of guests RSVP 'Yes'.  I'll keep you posted and find out how accurate that 'fun fact' is.

Spare Pair

I already found my shoes that I will be wearing for the wedding.  However, I'm assuming that I won't want to wear them all night, so I decided that I needed a second pair to switch into during the reception when my feet get tired.  First, I thought that I wanted a pair of flats for my second pair.  This would make it difficult to choose the length for the dress.

So then I started searching for wedges and that's when I found the most perfect shoes.  They are almost the exact same height as the first pair and had so many rave reviews about how comfortable they are!  Bonus:  they only cost $25!  And they shipped here in 2 days (they arrived today and I ordered them on Thursday).

Nina Risdy Sandal (the same brand as my first pair)

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.

What to Know about Wax

We ordered our wax for our invitations from scrapbooking-warehouse.com.  I just want to say that after finishing our invitations, I am very pleased with how well the wax worked.  When the wax first arrived, I was concerned that we didn't have enough because the sticks looked SO small.

We had ordered 3 packs of 6 sticks for a total of 18 sticks.  We only used half of the sticks after doing 85 invitations correctly and messing up on about 5 - so 90 total.  So, we actually ended up getting about 10 seals (twice as many as we had thought) from each stick.  This is what our seals looked like (they were each about the size of a quarter).



To simplify things: one stick of wax from that website got us 10 quarter-sized wax seals.

We're just going to use the extra and seal our Thank You cards since we had so much fun working with the wax on the invitations!