frugal invitation and music ideas for your wedding

as we approach the end of my series on planning a frugal wedding, here are some thoughts and ideas to about invitations, programs and music.

invitations+programs

making your invitations will not only save you money, but will allow you to be creative and make unique invites that fit your personality. furthermore, it will likely be a fun bonding time for your and some friends!

i wish i had a picture to share with you of our invitations. they were made of two pieces of brown card stock.  sandwiched in between was a long piece of pink paper inside folded accordion-style with four panels.  the first panel had 1 john 3:16 printed on it, and the other three, details about the wedding.  and the print was all in lower case, my typing style of choice, if you haven't noticed :)  each invite was tied in a piece of twine, and sealed in a brown recycled paper envelope.

i am not a very creative person, but i was able to come up with a design that was unique (i have never seen anything like it before or since!) and pretty simple to put together.  i should also give credit to my friend allison who helped tweak the design!  we were also blessed to get all the paper for this for free, since my uncle works at a paper company!  each invitation cost just over 50 cents apiece, including the cost of postage.  what a good deal!  i also really enjoyed the quality time i got to spend with some of my good friends as we hung out, chatted and laughed as we made hundreds of these things together.

another idea, if you really dont feel creative and/or are under a time crunch to prepare your invitations, is to buy an invitation making kit.  these kits come with everything you need (envelopes, paper, ribbons, etc) and only require that you print the invites from your home printer.  here is one example, but you can find tons of kits in various colors and designs. 

you will save SO much money by making them yourself.  furthermore, because i am a realist i will point out that people will end up throwing away the invitations anyways, so there is no use putting a ton of effort into them.  that being said, i am still happy for the [minimal] effort i put into the ones for our wedding.  they didn't require a ton of work, but i feel like our invites set the right tone for the feel we wanted for our wedding (God-centered and comfortable).

another way to save money is by having an electronic rsvp (this saves you the money from the rsvp cards, envelopes and stamps).  this is not only a more frugal option, but is just easier anyways, since most people prefer the ease of the internet over the mail.  we did this by setting up an email specifically for people to rsvp to.  another option is to use one of the many websites that will allow you to set up a site for this, such as theknot.com.  (or if you are computer savvy like some friends of mine were, set up your own website!  they even had people vote on aspects of the wedding on their site... how fun and unique!)

the same advice goes for programs for the wedding... making them will save you lots of money.  you can use a similar design for them as the invites, just tweaked a little bit (for example, accenting with a different stamp, or ribbon).  also- only make about half as many programs as you have guests.  most couples will just take one program, and many people wont take one at all.  i have never heard anyone give this as advice before, but i have always noticed at weddings that there are tons of leftover programs.  we only made about half as many programs as we had guests, and we still had leftovers!

in the picture to the right, you can see in the foreground that we used the extra paper and ribbon from our programs and invites to make signs for the different types of cake (we also did this for the different nacho toppings and drinks).  i like to be orderly and organized, so this made me happy :)



music 

our first dance was to the song "at last" by etta james.  not only has this been a favorite song of mine for a while, but it seemed like an appropriate way to celebrate finally being married after a 15 month long engagement!

how much did we spend on music?  not a dime.  this is because we made a playlist of songs on my ipod, and got a friend to be in charge of playing it.  he was also the "emcee" doing any of the various announcements that a dj normally would have made.

we were fortunate enough to be in a place where we just had to plug in our ipod and go, but some locations may not have sound equipment set up.  you can check into renting equipment, but for a first option i would check around to your church or elsewhere to see if they have sound equipment that they would be willing to lend out for a night.

what frugal invitation or music ideas do you have for someone planning a wedding?


go on to part seven here...