Wedding Bands!

We stopped in the jewelry store that T purchased my engagement ring from while we were Black Friday shopping today and found out that both of the wedding bands we wanted were on sale. Mine was $175 off and T's was $25 off. We decided to purchase them today.

Here is mine:

And here is T's:





Of course he had to pick out the heaviest ring possible. I don't get his logic but he says that if he's going to wear a wedding band he wants to feel that it is there.

And the best part about buying our rings today? My dad called me later in the day when we were finishing up shopping and told me that he was going to give me a pretty decent amount of cash for T and I for Christmas. It was enough that it is going to pay for our wedding bands completely!

Both of our rings needed to be sized and mine will show up in the next week or so and T's should be here in a month!

Definitely a big check off the list of wedding purchases!

Invitations

When I first started planning the wedding, I didn't care too much about invitations. Its just a piece of paper that eventually gets thrown away, right?

So I decided that I would just use Vistaprint deals and make our invitations that way. I created a few, but none of them were really what I wanted. They didn't have the color options or designs I wanted, and after the issues I had trying to create a monogram, I didn't want to upload an entire file as the invitation.

Then I started stalking knottie bio's and googling. I found the wonderful world of pocketfolds and knew I had to have them. But they were a bit expensive. For about 3 months I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I wanted pocketfolds, but I wasn't sure if I could justify that type of expense on well...paper.

I googled for a long time, searching every website that sold cardstock and pocketfolds to make sure that I could find the best deal possible. http://www.cardsandpockets.com/ had the best prices for the colors and style I wanted.

I'm kind of strange when it comes to paper. Well, anything office-supply related. I get really excited when stores put out the back to school supplies and there are tons and tons of pens, pencils, markers, post-it notes and other stuff on sale. I could honestly spend 2 or more hours in an office supply store, just looking at all of the stuff there. Sometimes I think I missed my calling as a school teacher, just so I could buy that stuff every year.

When I got an email from cardsandpockets.com that they were having a fall sale and saw a post on the DIY board that those sales were super rare, I made the decision to order pocketfolds.

I checked the guest list again and it turned out we needed 29 invitations. Of course, most pre-packaged items come in quantities of 25 or more. So I did have get higher quantites than I needed, but I figure at least I can definitely mess up a few times without having to order more. I also wanted to have extra invitations so we could keep one and send an extra set to our parents if they wanted them.

Here is the breakdown:

40 Signature Pocketfolds in Pine               $0.98 each              $39.20
2 packs of 25 qty. Blank Invitations           $5.00 each              $10.00
3 packs of 25 qty. Blank Enclosures          $4.98 each              $14.94
2 packs of 25 qty. RSVP Cards                  $4.00 each              $ 8.00
50 RSVP envelopes                                   $0.11 each              $ 5.25

I had purchased 55 outer envelopes for the RSVP's from another knottie on the Trash to Treasure board for $6. Because the sale was for everything, I also ordered cardstock to back our menu's.

25 Pack 8x11 Pine Cardstock                                $5.25
25 Pack 8x11 Pansy Cardstock                              $4.99

The cardsandpockets.com total for the invite pieces and cardstock was $87.88. The sale was 25% off which deducted $21.88 from the price. Shipping was $9.40. Total: $75.40

So, the total for everything related to the invitations, the cost is $83.39

Unfortunately, this does mean that before postage (and excluding the stamps and ink pad I bought), each invitation is costing me $2.61. I know that is pretty un-budget friendly. However, I did price out what it would cost us for premade invitations, or ones where you print your specific information, and the ones I found decent enough varied from $0.08 less or $1.24 more per invite.

Maybe I'm just a paper snob. Who knows. :( But, even though its a lot of money, I'm getting the invitations I really want and we're still under budget.