Wedding tips

[Miranda&James 8]

I made our invitations and it was really fun and personalized. If you don't have a huge guestlist, I'd suggest doing it(we had 80 ppl). It's much cheaper and you can make it better than what you'd see in a catalog. If I find it, I'll have to take a pic of our invitation and show it on here.

ooh also...If you want to get more personalized with tables at the reception, don't number them....name them! We named each table a different city in India. Then on the table we printed out a little bit of facts about that city and where it is on the map of India. It was fun. You can name them cities of both spouses' countries, etc. I also have a lot more tips for someone who really wants to personalize their wedding...you can PM me if you want to ask any details about what I did.

-We made table clothes out of muslin fabric, which we painted huge paisleys on, and then covered with sheer fabric.

-We used candy dishes with color coordinating candy in them as centerpieces.

-We put Indian looking candles on each table which we bought at the dollar store.

-We taught everyone who wanted to participate a stick dance of India.

-My bridesmaids did an Indian dance which I choreographed, and everyone truly felt like they were in India. Luckily we all have dancing experience! I wish I could put that dancing video clip online!!

-I had relatives with really good handwriting write the table seating arrangement cards.

-We used cupcakes stacked on terracotta pots for our cake.

sorry too much detail! But our wedding cost about $1000 and it was awesome, thanks to doing a lot ourselves.

Only $1000? Awesome job!!!! We've done a lot of things ourselves (invitations, table decorations, etc) but we definitely couldn't get it done with that budget! I'm really impressed, that sounds like it was absolutely beautiful!!

Most of the budgeting issue I have to say was because I wanted an expensive dress!

Edited April 13, 2006 by James_and_Miranda

[Anyta Holland 1]

Tell your wedding party you would appeciate it if they celebrated the NIGHT OF the wedding not the night before...I had to go drag two of my brothers out of the bar after midnight the night before our wedding..and one was the best man..arggggggggggghhhh. hahahahaha. I'm sure no one would actually do that, but I was annoyed...had I left him there he would have stayed til bar time and he was a bit hungover the next day anyway!!! M.

PS..choose rings you REALLY REALLY like..you're going to be wearing them a longgggggggg timeeeeeeeeeeee. We just got widish plain gold bands, and I love it because it represents our love for one another..but I wish we had had the time/money to get something just a little more fancy... No worries tho! M.

You'd be surprised! My best friend had her civil wedding in one city and her church one in another (both were from different cities).... Well.... The groom, had to be taken to hospital on the morning of the wedding due to excess of alcohol... He got to the wedding with small red eyes, terrible breath, and half asleep (still hungover of course), my friend never forgave him and they got divorced within 18 months... For other reasons of course!

[Anyta Holland 1]

I made our invitations and it was really fun and personalized. If you don't have a huge guestlist, I'd suggest doing it(we had 80 ppl). It's much cheaper and you can make it better than what you'd see in a catalog. If I find it, I'll have to take a pic of our invitation and show it on here.

I made my invitations myself aswell!!! I think they were pretty much out of the ordinary, I got some wooden boxes, a rubber stamp with a heart shape, a golden stamp ink, parchment paper, pink ribbon and golden wax (for sealing)... I printed the parchment in the computer with a dark yellow/light brown ink (it allowed me to do it both in spanish and in english, so saved some money there), they were half the size of a letter sized piece of paper, I rolled it and put ribbon around it to keep it like that... Then did the same with the reply slip, but this one was hald the size of the invitation.... I put both in the box and added some confetti (heart shaped one)... I then proceeded to stamp the box at the top with the rubber stamp, and put ribbon all around the box to seal it.... Finally, I would glue the name of the guest (s), which had been printed in parchment aswell, and sealed the ribbons with the wax and the seal.... They really looked nice! Will post a picture tomorrow if anyone is interested....

[pax 0]

Stina, when Ewen and I start planning our church wedding, I am definitely getting a hold of you! Sounds like you had a beautiful ceremony on a very modest budget--good for you.

[Sister Fracas 5]

We also saved a lot of money by printing EVERYTHING

Another tip is to look into wedding websites. We used Wedding Tracker.com. You can provide information about the wedding, events, bios on yourself and the wedding party, and one of the best features was being able to track RSVP through the site. You can set the site up so that people can RSVP without having to return response cards. You can also provide information on reception location, including maps, and you can direct people from the site to your registry, if you have one. Another great feature was being able to keep track of gifts received. It really was a great tool for us and people LOVED it....not only peeps that were going, but those that weren't able to.

We also saved a lot of money by printing EVERYTHING

Another tip is to look into wedding websites. We used Wedding Tracker.com. You can provide information about the wedding, events, bios on yourself and the wedding party, and one of the best features was being able to track RSVP through the site. You can set the site up so that people can RSVP without having to return response cards. You can also provide information on reception location, including maps, and you can direct people from the site to your registry, if you have one. Another great feature was being able to keep track of gifts received. It really was a great tool for us and people LOVED it....not only peeps that were going, but those that weren't able to.

[canadalaura 0]

My only tip for the K-1 folks would be that if you are going to have a small civil ceremony and plan a larger thing later... make concrete plans ASAP! We had/have nebulous plans for a "church" wedding with friends and family, but as more and more time passes without planning anything and already being married (and everyone know it) the more I feel like that day would feel "fake" or like I was playing make-believe.

In retrospect, we would have kept the civil ceremony a SECRET or put more time into making it more special (it WAS special, just not the wedding I had dreamt of) as we both feel like we were cheated out of having "our" day.

[chri'stina 190]

......

-We used cupcakes stacked on terracotta pots for our cake.

i would love to see the pics of your cupcake cake...

I'm sorry the picture is not too clear, it doesn't fully capture how it looked but here ya go ...oh by the way, we only stacked as many cupcakes as could fit nicely and had the rest in a tray in the back room to be handed out as well. They were red velvet cake cupcakes with white frosting, and candy on it that looked like pieces of colorful translucent confetti. One of my good friends was in charge of making and decorating them...I bought the cake mixes and frosting to give to her, and she made them and stacked them on there before the reception. It helps to have people who can take some of the load when you are planning a budget wedding!

I made our invitations and it was really fun and personalized. If you don't have a huge guestlist, I'd suggest doing it(we had 80 ppl). It's much cheaper and you can make it better than what you'd see in a catalog. If I find it, I'll have to take a pic of our invitation and show it on here.

I made my invitations myself aswell!!! I think they were pretty much out of the ordinary, I got some wooden boxes, a rubber stamp with a heart shape, a golden stamp ink, parchment paper, pink ribbon and golden wax (for sealing)... I printed the parchment in the computer with a dark yellow/light brown ink (it allowed me to do it both in spanish and in english, so saved some money there), they were half the size of a letter sized piece of paper, I rolled it and put ribbon around it to keep it like that... Then did the same with the reply slip, but this one was hald the size of the invitation.... I put both in the box and added some confetti (heart shaped one)... I then proceeded to stamp the box at the top with the rubber stamp, and put ribbon all around the box to seal it.... Finally, I would glue the name of the guest (s), which had been printed in parchment aswell, and sealed the ribbons with the wax and the seal.... They really looked nice! Will post a picture tomorrow if anyone is interested....

sounds really cool!

Stina, when Ewen and I start planning our church wedding, I am definitely getting a hold of you! Sounds like you had a beautiful ceremony on a very modest budget--good for you.

Thanks, and sure, you can always PM me when you start planning!

Edited April 13, 2006 by stina&suj

[Dixie_Peach 1]

I made our invitations and it was really fun and personalized. If you don't have a huge guestlist, I'd suggest doing it(we had 80 ppl). It's much cheaper and you can make it better than what you'd see in a catalog. If I find it, I'll have to take a pic of our invitation and show it on here.

I made my invitations myself aswell!!! I think they were pretty much out of the ordinary, I got some wooden boxes, a rubber stamp with a heart shape, a golden stamp ink, parchment paper, pink ribbon and golden wax (for sealing)... I printed the parchment in the computer with a dark yellow/light brown ink (it allowed me to do it both in spanish and in english, so saved some money there), they were half the size of a letter sized piece of paper, I rolled it and put ribbon around it to keep it like that... Then did the same with the reply slip, but this one was hald the size of the invitation.... I put both in the box and added some confetti (heart shaped one)... I then proceeded to stamp the box at the top with the rubber stamp, and put ribbon all around the box to seal it.... Finally, I would glue the name of the guest (s), which had been printed in parchment aswell, and sealed the ribbons with the wax and the seal.... They really looked nice! Will post a picture tomorrow if anyone is interested....

I'M INTERESTED! thanks!

[Sister Fracas 5]

We also saved a lot of money by printing EVERYTHING

Another tip is to look into wedding websites. We used Wedding Tracker.com. You can provide information about the wedding, events, bios on yourself and the wedding party, and one of the best features was being able to track RSVP through the site. You can set the site up so that people can RSVP without having to return response cards. You can also provide information on reception location, including maps, and you can direct people from the site to your registry, if you have one. Another great feature was being able to keep track of gifts received. It really was a great tool for us and people LOVED it....not only peeps that were going, but those that weren't able to.

Sorry everyone for dupicating the info in the post above...but it happened when the site went bonkers....

[Miranda&James 8]

I'd love to see a picture anyta!! We printed ours up, took about 6 hours but we got it done! I think they looked really nice at the end. We bought a box kit from Michaels and printed them all up (200 invites, 200 response cards, 200 response card envelopes, and 200 invitation envelopes with addresses on the back....and the printer didn't even mess up after 800 things going through it!) without any major mishap, I was so excited We mailed the bulk of them yesterday at 5pm and a lot of people already have theirs today!

[chri'stina 190]

I finally found our invitations that we made. (Since we just moved a lot is still in boxes!)

Remember that our wedding was Indian themed, and so I looked on Indian invitation websites for inspiration on how to make ours. I love red so I definitely wanted that to be the main color.

I bought red fibrous homemade paper from Ebay for around $20(25 sheets), I bought vellum paper from Office Depot for about $9(I still have extra vellum paper because they give a lot), 2 stencils from Michaels crafts(the stencils were hard metal ones), gold paint, gold ribbon, and a heart shaped hole puncher. We also needed a sliding cutter for neatly cutting the paper.

We cut each red paper in half, the invitations were not big. We made about 50 invites for 80 ppl(since whole families get one invite) and had a few extra. We printed the words on the vellum and glued the top of the vellum to the inside of the invitations. We folded the sides of the invitation so that you had to open "2 doors" to get inside. We punched a heart shaped hole on each door to put the ribbon through to tie it shut. We also stenciled gold on the outside and on the inside bottom of the invitation. My mom, sister, and friend helped me and we got them done in less than 2 hours.

It's so weird to think we made these before Sujeet was here! Since he only arrived about 2 weeks before our wedding. Anyway, people said they really liked the invitations, that they were unique and felt like they were opening a little gift in order to read inside. We also stamped the bottom of the envelopes that were to be mailed...I just couldn't leave anything "plain". We also printed the rsvp info on vellum that we put loose inside the invitation. We didn't have the kind to be maild back, we had people email or call to rsvp since there wasn't a huge amount of people.

Anyway, I hope this can help inspire anyone who wants to make their own invites!

Our Indian style invitations:

I made our invitations and it was really fun and personalized. If you don't have a huge guestlist, I'd suggest doing it(we had 80 ppl). It's much cheaper and you can make it better than what you'd see in a catalog. If I find it, I'll have to take a pic of our invitation and show it on here.

I made my invitations myself aswell!!! I think they were pretty much out of the ordinary, I got some wooden boxes, a rubber stamp with a heart shape, a golden stamp ink, parchment paper, pink ribbon and golden wax (for sealing)... I printed the parchment in the computer with a dark yellow/light brown ink (it allowed me to do it both in spanish and in english, so saved some money there), they were half the size of a letter sized piece of paper, I rolled it and put ribbon around it to keep it like that... Then did the same with the reply slip, but this one was hald the size of the invitation.... I put both in the box and added some confetti (heart shaped one)... I then proceeded to stamp the box at the top with the rubber stamp, and put ribbon all around the box to seal it.... Finally, I would glue the name of the guest (s), which had been printed in parchment aswell, and sealed the ribbons with the wax and the seal.... They really looked nice! Will post a picture tomorrow if anyone is interested....

I hope you can post a pic of it!

[pax 0]

Your invitations are beautiful, Stina! They look professionally-made, seriously.

[chri'stina 190]

Your invitations are beautiful, Stina! They look professionally-made, seriously.

thank you!

I had seen invitations similar to this online and tried to duplicate them. Also I have to give credit to my family who helped as well!

[blackbettie 0]

LOVE all of your tips, keep them coming!

I don't have another tip myself, but I need one concerning the bride's flower bouquet. I don't plan to have a "normal" bouquet with many (different) flowers in it, I'd much rather have a single flower, a bigger one with a long, thick stalk. Thing is, I really do love flowers, but I can only tell a rose from a sunflower and that's about it. I have no idea what the name of the flower that I'm looking for might be - it's hard to google and find a picture too (since I don't know the name).

I know I'm being pretty vague with my description - but then, I don't have one certain flower pictured in my head, I bet there are hundreds that could come into question.

Maybe someone has an idea what kind of flower I could use.

Sandra

[canadalaura 0]

thought about a gerbera daisy?