DIY Wedding Tips: Invitations and Thank You’s

Looking back on that special day, that I  married my prince charming…a few wedding tips come to mind for brides-to-be who are planning on a budget.

 How to put together beautiful, yet inexpensive invitations:

The theme for my wedding was black and white damask, with an accent color of purple.  It turned out magnificent, very classy.  We ordered our invitations online with a company called Vistaprint.  We happened to hit a sale when the exact invitation that we loved was 50% off!  We were able to order 500 invitations for the amazing price of about $125.  The invitations were beautiful ~ black and white with a hint of purple. 

Then on to the next step, we choose our very favorite engagement picture and had our photographer help us edit it to be a black and white photo.  Walmart was a great place to make a lot of prints.  The prints turned out looking very professional.  Usually people post the invitation on their fridge and once the wedding is over they throw it away.  The nice thing about having the picture separate, from the actual invitation card, is that people can hold onto the picture and toss the invitation. 

Next, I designed on Microsoft Word a map of where the reception was to be held, along with a listing of where we were registered.  We then printed it out on nice card stock.   Since it is important to have all of your attachments put together nicely, I went to a store called Xpedx, which sells wholesale paper supplies.  There, I found these “swirly” silver clips that act as paper clips.  These handy dandy clips are great to keep everything organized and together, and adds a perfect finishing touch.

Now that we had all of the parts for our invitation ready– it was time for the best part, putting them together!  One evening, we had a bunch of family members form an assembly line making the task of putting them together rather fast and simple. 

I can’t tell you how many people complimented on us, at our wedding, on how beautiful our invitations were. 

The next do-it-yourself tip is making your own thank-you cards. What I did was, I made two posters.  One saying “Thank” and the other saying “You”.  During our formal pictures, my groom and I posed together holding these posters next to each other.  Next we had our photographer edit them and we made them into postcards!!

This is a very personal way to express gratitude to your guests.  Also, it was fairly inexpensive to print.  The total price probably came out to be $75 to make 300 postcards.  Postage for postcards is cheaper than sending a thank-you card. It is only 28 cents per post-card! 

I can’t tell you how many countless comments we received about our invitations and thank-you cards.  The thing is…we put them all together ourselves.  My goal was to stay under-budget, and that I did!

Written by Sarah Yeager of Salt Lake City, recent bride and follower of NoKnowsWeddings.com.