Specially For You In a Brown Paper Bag

It was three weeks out from our wedding and I still hadn't the slightest clue of what we were going to gift our wedding party.  When you add our parents and officiant, we were buying for a total of seventeen people. We decided we wanted our gifts to be simple, meaningful and cost effective.

Let's start with the boys. We briefly contemplated custom cuff links, but couldn't decide on what exactly we would pick out...kayaks, skateboards, snowboards, states? We couldn't pinpoint any one idea so we scratched that idea. We both really liked the idea of flasks, but felt like it was too common and expected. The solution came when I realized how much Mr. Honey really enjoys drinking beer out of a frosty beer mug; seriously the man loves an ice cold mug straight out of the freezer for his brew! Ah ha, custom made beer mugs for our groomsmen, dad's and officiant. We picked up this glass etching glue and this reusable stencil set from Hobby Lobby for a total of $13 (after a 40% off coupon). After browsing Ross & TJ Maxx for an affordable set of (large, Mr. Honey requested they be large in size) beer mugs, we happened to stumble upon the Dollar Tree. Gigantic beer mugs for one dollar! The etching process was pretty dang easy: apply stencils, secure with tape, slather with etching glue, let sit for one minute and rinse!

The other part to the guys gifts was their ties. Way back when I talked about the guys outfits, I said that we would have them in mismatched ties; I used cheap-neckties.com to buy a mismatch of ties and bow ties in navy patterns and ended up with 2 bow ties and 4 ties (one for Zeus!). Beer mugs and ties made for the perfect gift for our the special dudes in our wedding!

I love this picture of our groomsmen doing a "Cheers!" with the mugs and proudly sporting their ties/bow ties:

For my girls, I decided to go the same etching route but use dainty wine glasses instead of manly mugs. We got the wine glasses from the Dollar Store as well. I decided to put their names along the base of the wine glass instead of on the actual cup part:

I chose not to get the girls matching jewelry because each of them were picking out their own bridesmaid dress which meant varying necklines and details on each dress. I had fallen in love with the personalized hanger trend and decided to DIY to keep it on the cheap. I ordered a pack of wooden hangers from Walmart and used a white sharpie to just free write each girls name on the hanger. It was ridiculously simple and super cheap (20 hangers for $20.97! This also meant the guys got a nice hanger to hang their suit on, sans a heart and their name), plus it gave the personalized effect I was going for:

I had decided I wanted the girls to wear cardigans to help keep them warm during the celebration and picked up 8 gray cardigans at Target for $20 (which the girls later paid me for so it wasn't included in their gifts). To add a little flare to the simple cardigan, I made the same peach fabric flowers that I made for my garter and attached them to a pin and stuck them on the sweater. They turned out so cute! I even got a matching navy cardigan for myself and made a gray flower. Here's a shot of all the girls outfits ready to be put on the day of the wedding:

Every girl can use a little Bath & Body Works so I hit up the After Christmas sale and got a lotion, hand sanitizer and little bag for a total of $7 each. The last part of the girls gifts included free prints that I had collected over time from various blogs, which I printed at home and framed in little .97 frames from Wally World. I kept the quotes all happy and positive but tailored each quote to each girl, here's a couple examples.

For BM Fawn who recently beat colon cancer and truly is a sunshine-y person:

Sunshine Free Print via Collected Blog


For BM Scoot, because she fell in love with the song "Home" for her wedding:

Home Free Print via eighteen25 blog

Once I had collected all pieces to the gifts it was time for packaging. Simple, right? Wrong. I had an idea of how I wanted to wrap the gifts and it included kraft paper bags and tags made out of paint chip samples in our colors. BUT I couldn't find kraft paper bags anywhere...then I retraced my steps to search for white gift bags also to no avail. Thursday on the way to the airport to pick up my friend, I had had enough and just decided to use lunch bags. Yes our wedding party gifts were wrapped in lunch bags. I got crafty though, and with the help of two friends, left over card stock and yarn, we made them pretty darn cute (shhh don't tell the guys that their beer mugs were wrapped in a cute lunch bag!) if I do say so myself:

We handed out the gifts to everyone at our rehearsal dinner, after a very brief "thank you for coming" speech from yours truly and a big toast. Knowing our budget was next to nothing for wedding gifts, making them uber special was key. So just how did we do in the price department?
Guys:
5 beer mugs at $1 = $5
3 ties at $10 = $30
2 bow ties, 1 at $9.99 and 1 at $14.95= $24.94
Total of $59.94 or $11.98 per gift

Girls:
8 wine glasses at $1 = $8
8 hangers at $1 = $8
8 frames at .97 = $7.76
8 prints for free
8 Bath & Body Works goodies at $7 = $56
8 fabric flowers at $1 (this includes the cost of fabric and the cost of the pins) = $8
Total of $87.76 or $10.97 per gift

Parents & Officiant:
The dad's and our officiant received the beer mug and my mom received the wine glass. At $1 each we knew that obviously this wasn't remotely close enough to showing our gratitude, so we will be gifting them something special with wedding photos in the next few months. I will be sure to share that with you all!

Our gifts made our groomsmen and bridesmaids happy, and the more pictures I look through the more I see just how much use our homemade mugs and glasses got; I don't think the guys put down their mugs all weekend! Being that we served all beverages in plastic, it also made the wedding party stand out with their fancy schmancy glass cups!

What did you gift your wedding party? Anyone else now considering wrapping all future gifts in lunch sacks?!

Sweet Price Tag

It was never a question for me whether or not I would design our invitations. My job is very logical and so any creative outlet I can utilize, I do. Client presentations have become very colorful, just to appease my creative urges. Our budget also had something to do with it, as much as I would kill for a custom illustrated suite, it wasn't in the cards for us. I started brainstorming in the first week we were engaged and over the course of the year I slowly created our invitation suite. Having time on my side was a huge advantage; I was able to take my time and when I would reach a point of frustration I could walk away and (hopefully) come back more inspired. So, just how much did our DIY suite come out costing?
A Sweet Price Tag:
Printing: $86.75 at Office Depot.
Gray Card stock: $14.25 from Cards and Pockets, 3 packs for $4.75
Cobalt Envelopes: $25.20 from Cards and Pockets, 120 for 21 cents. $15.46 for shipping.
Oyster Gray Twine: $10 from Whisker Graphics. $3 for shipping.
RSVP Postcards: $14.97 from Vistaprint. $6.50 for shipping. 
Mini Moo Cards: Free from Moo.com. $5 for shipping.
Labels: $16.17 for Oval and $16.17 for round from Office Depot.
Postage: $77.40.
Total: $260.91
Shipping for all products was $29.96 bringing that to $290.87.
We sent out 110 invitations, bringing the cost per invite to $2.37 or $2.64 when I include shipping in the total cost.

The wild card with DIY invites (or anything DIY, for that matter) is your time spent on the task. Frankly, I have no idea how many hours I spent on our invitations, or how much an average invitation creator charges. No clue. However, I was especially curious how my $2.60 invites compared to something (I also wanted to prove to the mister that we did in fact save money!). I fully realize this is comparing apples to oranges, and is by no means an official research, it just provided me with a comparison.

A quick search on Wedding Paper Diva's returned an approximate price of $442 for 110 invitations, RSVP's and an insert (no envelope, postage, twine or mini moo). I often visited Whimsical Prints on Etsy, and fell in love with multiple designs in her shop. I estimated a suite of 110 (not including postage or the extras) would have been around $375. Based on this very loose research, I'd say I saved a pretty penny. Happy, Mr. Honey?!

Some Sweet Tips!
Printing: I chose to stick with a local printer, well a national chain, but a local location. I compared Office Depot to The UPS Store, and while the prices were just about the same, the quality was not. Office Depot's printing was far superior. I went in to both stores before committing and had them print off one of everything for me to see how my colors translated through their printer. Office Depot printed my order for me while I waited, a whole 15 minutes!

Twine: I used the (k)Not twine from Whisker Graphics, it's discounted because there may be a smudge somewhere on the twine or it has an inconsistent wrap. I didn't care, have yet to notice any sort of a flaw, and it saved me $5. (k)Not is only available when a batch goes awry, so I checked every other day until my color was in.

Postcards: Sign up for Vistaprint. Now. They run the best deals. I got 100 postcards for free but paid for 2 of my own uploads, and then for a color backside. Still, my RSVP's were only fifteen cents a piece. If you go this route, may I suggest having your return address on the front/glossy side. I had the guests write their responses on the glossy side, and while it's not really an issue, I can tell some people had to switch pens once or twice.

Mini Moo's: I scored big time on these (thanks Mrs. Hippo!), I came across a deal and got my mini's for free, I just had to pay the $5 shipping. I had my cards all set and in my cart for a couple weeks and was planning on spending the $20, so the deal didn't persuade me to order, it was just icing on the cake. I used 12 different pictures, but wish I would have kept it to 8. I had one that was too mushy and one that wasn't mushy enough. Seriously, picking which mini moo went to which guest was challenging!

Labels: I had originally planned on using the labels that Mrs. Pony used on hers, but I couldn't get them formatted on my dang printer...so I happened to be in Office Depot and picked up the round and oval labels from Avery. I downloaded the template, inserted a border and then had to also insert a text box to be able to have text inside the border. Headache. This forced me to just do one page of labels, and then replace the current text with the next guest addresses (type 18 addresses, print, next 18 addresses, print, etc). In the grand scheme of things it wasn't that time consuming, and I loved the peach dots so I was fine with it. What I wasn't fine with was the fact that these labels smudge. They smudge horribly. Even though it says they are compatible with ink jet and laser printers, and after letting the labels dry for multiple hours. I can guarantee every single envelope was delivered with a smudged label, boo.

That's a lot of words and no pictures for one post...but I hope if you are planning/hoping/in the middle of creating your invites, you found something helpful. The price helped, but I found creating our suite so rewarding, I would do it all over again!

How did the cost of your DIY invites breakdown? Any helpful hints for other DIYers out there?