Added, special details can make a wedding fabulous.  Those details don’t have to ruin your dreams of huge wedding savings!

Check out these DIY Fabric Envelope Liners!

I like to think most brides try to get a little crafty for their wedding, and that those same brides don’t have a stock pile of craft supplies ar0und.  Well, that’s definitely my scenario.  For example, I am going to make our rehearsal dinner invitations.  No, they will not be anything super fancy but I am going to borrow my office’s paper cutter for the weekend.  Sure, I could buy a paper cutter… but when am I going to use it again?  I also might use one of our printers to run the invites off.  Yes, I do have a printer at home but the one at the office is quicker and I won’t use up all of our ink!

If your office isn’t equipped with useful tools, or your wedding usage would not be encouraged, then check with your friends and family.  You might be surprised as to what their offices have and they can borrow.  Now, don’t go all re-con to get the materials, and don’t get greedy with what you take.  You won’t be able to pay for your wedding if you get fired!  I will definitely ask my office manager if I can borrow the paper cutter for the weekend… if he says no maybe I will just bring everything into the office and stay late one day.

If you’re getting married, then you have probably heard about Etsy, and you really do not need to read this post.  If you have not heard about Etsy, then please go check it out- it’s a “handmade” marketplace.  I don’t know about you, but to me, marketplace is one of those words which always excites me…

Through Etsy you can search and check out thousands of designers/creators, read feedback from previous customers, and request samples.  I probably ordered fifteen different invitation samples and drove Mr. soon-to-be-Heather crazy.  I did have to pay for said invitation samples, but it’s normally the cost of just one invitation.  Everyone I reached out to was very friendly but not intrusive, and they all seemed very open to customizations.

In the end, I ordered my invitations from Green Been Designs.  Jenn has been fabulous, but unfortunately for you, she’s now on maternity leave.  Not only are they perfect for our event, but they were also less expensive then any of the major online invitation boutiques, and much less expensive then any local designers that I spoke to.

Yes, printing your own invitations is the least expensive option, but using Etsy will increase your wedding savings!

Yes, I know that you know that less people means less money.  And believe me, I understand that you want everyone you know to come to your wedding.  Or, that you have tried to come up with a smaller guest list, but the must haves just keep adding up.

Well, most will estimate that 85% of all invited guests will attend.  However, out of town guests or elderly guests can drive down your retention rate to as low as 45%.  What that means to me, is you really have no way to tell how many people will come to your wedding.

To make our invite list, my fiance and I grouped our guest list into three tiers: “will come”, “might come”, and “probably won’t come”.   We hope that even if people switch tiers, it will all balance out in the end.  But because this is a wedding savings blog…  here are some of my tips to cut your guest list before you make tiers (in no particular order):

1. Don’t invite anyone that you don’t consider a great friend. Our wedding location is not local for most guest, so when inviting people, I always ask myself, would I fly somewhere for their wedding?  It doesn’t matter if they invited me to their wedding, or if we used to be really close.  I figure that they would feel annoyed to have to come anyway.  I’ve happily been working on a separate list of announcements to send out the day after the wedding.

2. Don’t invite anyone that you haven’t met before. This might sound strange but this is for the collective “we”.  My fiance and I have been together long enough that we should have met anyone “important” in either of our lives.  If we or you haven’t taken the initiative to see us in the past few years, I don’t see why you are “important” enough to come to our wedding.  Again, very happily adding this group to the above mentioned announcement list.

3.  No “and guests” invites. If you have not heard about a significant other, then they don’t need to be invited to the wedding.  I sometimes wonder if an “and guest” invite is almost a challenge for singles to find a date.  Certainly you can try to be flexible with people and they come back and ask if they can bring a date.  A kind response would be: “we don’t have a lot of room in our budget for guests, but let me get back to you when all of rsvp’s come back, if we get enough declines we would be happy for you to bring a guest.”

4. No coworkers or children. If you are really close with some of your coworkers, or if you are close with some little one’s, and your day would not be the same without them then these would not be a good cuts for you.  These two blanket policies are great to eliminate numbers from your guest list and not hurt feelings.  As in “I’m sorry we really want an adult affair” or “We’re having a really small family wedding”.

5. Don’t send out save-the dates to everyone. This might sound a little fishy, but unless someone is family or a timeless friend, they might fall out of favor.  Waiting until closer to the wedding to commit to invite recent friends, local friends, coworkers, or friends of friends.  The decision may be easier then you think in a few months!

Good luck choosing who will be invited to share your special day!  Your wedding guests should all be people you love and who should be there to witness your happy day!  But if worse comes to worse, they should be people that you want to spend money on, and if not, cutting them from the guest list will increase your wedding savings!

Hi this is your Wedding Diva and I’m here to give you more of the weird wedding stuff. Today, I’d like to show you some weird or bizarre wedding invitations. You will see some really creative wedding invitations and some outright weird wedding invites from the site I will link you to.

Click the link and see these so called weird wedding invitations. Who knows, you might even get creative inspiration on the kind of invite you might want to design and send out yourself. This is your Wedding Diva saying have a great day and wait for more wedding savings tips and wedding blogs on how to have an inexpensive wedding. Toodles!

A fabulous day to you! We featured really nice videos about wedding invitations a couple of weeks ago. There were three videos and they were all about how to make your own inexpensive wedding invitations. But it doesn’t end there. Today, we have some more of these informational wedding invitation videos.

The video is hosted by Sarah Mayer Walsh, who is one of the founders of Haute Papier, a couture stationary studio in Washington DC. The video below is another lesson about wedding invitation etiquette. Here, Sarah explains what pieces of your elegant but inexpensive wedding papier or paper you should send and when.
After this video, stay tuned for our next invitation installment about making your own inexpensive wedding “save the date” invitation cards.

Haute Papier founder, Sarah Mayer Walsh, is here once again to guide you on how to make your own inexpensive wedding invitation ensemble so you can earn a bit of wedding savings.

On this video, Sarah talks about the four different types of printing. There are actually more than four types, but by far, the four she enumerates are the most popular and easily accessible for the average soon-to-be wed couple.

The series of videos doesn’t end here, though. Tune in for more video installments next week as Sarah uses her expertise in wedding invitations and reveals to us the things we need to know about creating them yourself. So, I hope you enjoyed the first batch of the series. Until next time, toodles!

[Source: Monkeysee.com]

Here’s Sarah Mayer Walsh again for the second installment of her wedding invitation video series. I sure am excited about what we are going to learn from her today. She will guide you on how to make your own elegant but inexpensive wedding invitations.

Sarah talks about the invitation ensembles on this video. The envelope or the box doesn’t only include the wedding invitation, the whole invitation package also includes other things which you will learn more about once you click on this video.

Dahlens, today we give you a series of videos on everything you need to know about wedding invitations and how to make them yourself. I assure you that this is a fun and educational series of videos.

Sarah Mayer Walsh, one of the founders of the Haute Papier a Couture stationary studio in Washington DC, will be guiding you on how to make elegant invitations and even throws a little bit of wedding paper etiquette along the way.

On this video, Sarah discussed a bit of invitation trivia and also listed the basic materials that are needed in making your own inexpensive wedding invitations. So just click the video and stay tuned, since there are more videos in this series to come.

[Source:MonkeeSee.com]

Last 13th of September  2009, I featured an awesome 3-D animation wedding invitation. Of course, you’d be spending a fortune if you yourself would go for that kind of wedding invitation, since there are no wedding savings to get here. So, I guess it would be best to feature another form of wedding video invitation that is more achievable and affordable than having a Computer Graphics version.

Long before complex computer graphics dominated today’s filmmaking, we were satisfied with what we call ‘stop motion animation’.  So, let’s go back to the basics here and see how equally entertaining this kind of video presentation is. Click the video to see a sample of what I am talking about.