I was a bridesmaid for a close friend’s wedding in September (the bride had 11 bridesmaids, with several being from out-of-state).  Her Maid of Honor had already thrown her a nice shower in Mississippi, and someone needed to step up to put together a shower for her here in Nashville.  With having been recently engaged a month prior, I thought this seemed like a good opportunity to test a few of the ideas that I was gathering for our wedding, but in a more constructive and considerate way.  Her other shower had been more formal/classic, as expected for a Southern Bell from Brandon, Mississippi, so I decided to pour on the  country rustic charm for her Nashville gathering.

I knew I needed a venue that was both affordable (ideally free), contributed to the shabby country theme to cut back on outside decorations, and that could accommodate a guest list of around 60.  Coincidentally, I work part-time at a well-known music venue in Nashville that was the perfect fit– The World Famous Station Inn.  With having gone a tad “overboard” in my lengthy planning (I even had a binder), I could write several posts on this, but have broken things down into some useful tidbits from this learning experience:
Begin at the Beginning– Invitations DO Set the Stage

I have a great friend (and bridesmaid) who is a graphic designer.  She will oftentimes come up in future posts, so we’ll call her Penguin to protect her covert identity (unless you’d like to hire her for any projects, in which case you can message me).  To set the vibe for the shower, Penguin drew from the popular Nashville Hatch Show Print inspiration, as these prints/posters are also found lining the walls of the venue.   After getting the design in place, I printed and cut them myself, stuck with a size that would allow for cheap envelopes & standard postage.  I did spend more on the invites than I had initially planned, but got several compliments on them.  I have to admit, they were without a doubt the best shower invitations I’ve seen to date– Way to go on the design, Penguin!

Experiment with DIY Projects EARLY

I constructed simple centerpieces for the shower with Mason jars, vase filler, rafia & floating candles.  I thought that visually the centerpieces looked nice, set a softer tone for the room than it usually has, but the small candles were a pain to keep lit.  It could have been because they were so small, but I decided against using these at our wedding.  I’m a perfectionist generally, and not having all candles stay lit throughout the shower bothered me.

 
I had also seen ideas on Pinterest for a s’mores bar and fell in love with it.  I decided to make a scaled back s’mores bar for the shower to test the idea.  I thought the bar added a nice element (although in doing one at a wedding, I would made some different upgrades), but the catering candle went out several times & needed re-lit, which was a slight pain.  It obviously wasn’t the end of the world, but someone at a wedding would have to keep up with this or it’s useless.  There were a couple of kids at the shower who were running around (also a learning aspect), and the s’mores bar was of course an area of interest for them.  I was EXTREMELY concerned with one of them knocking the table and getting severely burned (the catering candles are made of gel that you light)– For a wedding, a bigger, sturdier area would be better, and positioned away from higher traffic areas.  Lastly, not many guests at the shower actually made s’mores, although several did comment that it was a great idea.  It was a cost-effective thing to add and I would suggest it to other brides, but am electing to skip it for our Big Day just based on actual use during this trial run.

I made a TON of cake pops for favors, nicely packaged, with a cute label on the front (I’d cashed in a Groupon for the customized labels).  This was a great idea, I enjoy doing things like that, but if Penguin hadn’t come over to help me, I would have been in a world of trouble time-wise.  I feel like the guests appreciated the favor (I distributed them to ensure nobody got out without one), but I made way too many.  Then again, leftover/extra cake pops never seems to hurt any feelings! Mmmm…  

I’d seen tutorials for making cake stands and this is something I would hands-down suggest.  I chose to make mine out of plates & vases, glue & spray paint.  These were a great idea, and I plan to repaint the ones I have, plus make more for our wedding.  Click here for a great tutorial, although I elected to spray paint mine (make sure you use food safe spray paint if you’re planning to have food directly on the stand).

Delegating/ Asking for Help

One of the most important things that I learned from putting on the shower was that even though you CAN do something yourself, it doesn’t mean you always SHOULD.  I will always hate delegating, I will always feel insecure in not knowing that something is getting done by doing it myself, but I have to get over that.  With the stress of planning a wedding, the last thing a bride needs is a ton of additional worries.  The shower was a wake-up call for me in this area, and I’m constantly putting thought into who I can have help with what, and keeping up with areas that certain individuals volunteer to help with.

Budgets

The closer you can realistically estimate, the better (common sense, I know).  I started out without a budget because it was “just a shower,” and that was a mistake.  Even  budget savvy/thrifty purchases and plans can quickly add up without keeping a grasp on the big picture of your expenses.  Regardless of whether you’re getting a great deal on  paper lanterns in Chinatown on a vacation to New York for a great price (Pearl River beats most I’d found), you’re still spending that additional money & need to put early thought into it.  Whether you’re spending in tiny pieces or large chunks, it accumulates.

Overall, putting on the shower was both a very helpful and fun experience.  I had some great friends step in to help me (that weren’t even necessarily involved with the bride), and I couldn’t have done it without them.  I have a feeling that this is something that will hopefully extend throughout our wedding.  To sing their praises even more, they put on one heck of a surprise engagement party for Eric & I the same weekend, but we’ll save that story for another day!

So I’m having a wedding in less than a year that will be out of town for most all of my friends and family, what is one of the most important things to do as soon as possible in this situation…send save the dates! Ok, so originally this didn’t make much sense to me. Being the budget savvy bride that I am, I didn’t want to spend money on save the dates! I figured about 2 hours after we got engaged, all of the people that were important to me knew we were engaged and when our wedding would be. If we haaad to do save the dates I just wanted to email them, but my super logical and considerate fiancé explained how our older family members were not surfin’ the net on a regular basis, so this was no good. Finally I gave in and started thinking of the save the dates as a fun and cheap way to give our guests a first look at the tone and vibe of our wedding. I was still doing this cheaply though!

Designing

I absolutely didn’t want to pay a graphic designer to create these for me, I would rather save money and have great invitations. Luckily, I have Adobe InDesign on my computer and have a working knowledge of how to use it from college. I’m not sure what a free program online would be that you could use to make collateral pieces like save the dates, but would be curious to know if you all have used any. I have a lot of little projects (like awesome wedding mad libs) to do before the wedding and my computer crashed, so I lost the program and had to get a new computer. Thanks Addy for spilling water on it!

Matt and I had not found a photographer yet, so we didn’t have engagement pictures to put on there and anyway I kind of dislike cheesy engagement pictures, so we went with a more fun and cheaper route. We decided to include pictures of us when we were little. This has been a huge hit! If most people are like me, I really don’t want to keep a save the date up on my fridge for 9 months that is a picture of two people sucking face

To make the save the dates reflect the wedding, I wanted them to be quirky, so I wanted all the text to be different sizes and fonts. It turned out really well and I think it made the whole thing look like it was more design-ey. I also included striped that were in the wedding colors. Matt’s special touch to the save the date, was including a lyric from a song that we are using in the wedding. I loved the idea and it made them even more personal and fun!

Front. Our babies will be so cute

Back. Classy blackout job, I know.

Printing

The hardest part of creating the save the dates myself was figuring out what size to make them and where to print them. I started asking friends that work as graphic designers and deal with printers a lot. One of them recommended egprint. Their website showed that they offered 2 sided, color postcards for a little over $40 for 500 of them. AMAZING DEAL! Postcards mean cheaper postage and an easy to design rectangle shape. There were two catches, 1) I only needed around 150 and the lowest quantity you could order was 500 and 2) I had to sign myself up as a business on the website to order from them. I decided that 500 at $40 was cheaper than 150 anywhere else, so it was worth it and I also signed up just under some random business name and that worked out fine too. I highly recommend this place! We got them in the mail and they were printed perfectly and they arrived right on time.

So my tips on doing affordable save the dates are to not be afraid to do it yourself. Its not the actual invitation, have fun with it! Secondly, find an online printer that specializes in quick, bulk prints. Lastely, don’t be afraid to pretend you are a business to get a better deal!

I was horrified when I started to look at wedding invitations and what people spend on little pieces of paper. So when it came down to finding my own invitations, I was initially in full DIY mode. I had it all figured out- all I would need would be cardstock, some watercolor paints and a regular printer. I knew what type of design I would paint and exactly how it would look. As I planned this, I was also of course coming up with lots of other great handmade projects and creative things to do for the wedding. The list was suddenly getting very long, but my fiancé just shrugged and told me he knew I could handle it if it was that important to me.

Of course, my mom struggled to be politely supportive and yet discouraging at the same time. It was at her insistence that I “just look around” for some pre-made invitations that I could be happy with. On the second stop of our wedding supply excursion, we popped into Target, actually to exchange an early bridal shower gift. We wandered over to the stationary section, and voila! there were some super simple pseudo-letterpress invitations and RSVP cards that were very simple to my watercolor vision. The invitations were a simple half sheet of off-white with a green dandelion on one side. Oh yeah, and they were on clearance. It was perfect. I spent about $85 on 150 invitations.

My oh-so-simple and oh-so-cheap invitations and RSVP cards

The struggles that ensued with those invitations were concrete proof as to why painting my own invitations was a crazy idea.

It shouldn’t have been so difficult. I found a template online for the invitations, and it took me just an hour or so to figure out how I wanted to lay out the print on the invitation. I hit a bit of a snag in trying to download a font to my Mac, but a quick computer switch with Dave and I was good to go. Or so I thought.

I have a pretty basic HP printer. Nothing fancy, but does a good job. Unfortunately, its format does not allow you to center the paper you are trying to print on. You have to line the paper up on one side in order to print it. But the template I used was formatted so that the paper was supposed to be centered. I know this sounds confusing, but the end result was that only have of the ink made it on the actual invitation, while the rest missed completely, going on to an imaginary centered document. It looked like this:

This is what happens when your computer and your printer don't agree on where exactly the paper is

Not good. And not as easy to fix as I thought it would be. I had to abandon my 8.5 x 5 in. template in favor of a normal 8.5 x 11 document, set my margins and guess as to how the typeface would fit around the dandelion. It took foreeeeeverrrrrr. But, hallelujah, I figured it out! My invitations were perfect. I was so thrilled, I was jumping up and down. Dave was a little put out, because according to him I wasn’t nearly as excited when he proposed to me.

But life was good, and I commenced printing-and immediately realized my printer was getting completely hung up on the paper I was using. If I put more than one piece of paper in the printer at a time, it would pull in two or three pieces at a time and mess them all up. So in the end, I had the oh-so-scintillating experience of printing all 125 of my invitations individually, sitting next to the printer and feeding it one sheet of paper at a time.

That’s what you call devotion to a cause.

My beautiful finished product!

What kind of invitations did you guys choose? DIY or fully engraved? Did you hit any speed bumps in your printing process like I did?

How to make DIY Wedding Corsages and Boutonnières
By Diana from BloomsByTheBox.com

Getting a corsage made by a florist will cost about $15 per person. If you DIY your own wedding flowers and purchase roses for about $1.00 per stem and use one filler and green your corsages come out to less than $3.00 per person. If you are already arranging your own flowers you can even use the couple left over flowers to make corsages and boutonnières for your wedding guests. It saves a whole lot of money and also is a great way to improvise and create original pieces for the members of your wedding. Making specialized pieces is a sincere move that the special people in your lives will truly appreciate.

What you will need:

1. Floral Scissors
2. Green Floral Tape
3. Elastic Corsage Wristlets
4. Corsage Pins
5. Roses and filler flowers of your choice

How to “Do-It-Yourself”

1. Select a color scheme and a focal flower (Blooms By The Box gives free consultations to help you put together an order)
2. Pick out a green and filler to accompany the focal flower and your wedding color scheme
3. Use floral tape to attach the focal flower to the greenery, pull the tape to make it stick to itself and wrap around the stems tightly, keep in mind you want the front of the greenery to show when placed on a guest’s wrist.
4. Add the filler around the sides and in front of the focal flower by using the floral tape to add onto the base you have made so far.
5. Place the flowers against in the center of the metal attached to the elastic wristlet; bend the tabs in to secure the flowers.
6. Go over the metal with floral tape to disguise the metal.
7. To make the finished professional look, go over the entirety of the stems with the floral tape.
8. Use the scissors to make clean cut at the end of the stems.
9. Use the corsage pins to pin your finished boutonniere to the suite jacket of your special guests.
Watch this video for STEP-BY-STEP Help!

 *BloomsbytheBox.com is a sponsor of The Budget Savvy Bride.

Before I post my final recap I wanted to write a little about our table numbers. My hubby wrote about them on his blog Math Goes Pop! and so I thought I would share as well.

As I may have mentioned, my husband is a mathematician, and so I wanted to do something that reflected this in our table numbers. I asked him to come up with 10 mathematically significant numbers or symbols and we used these for the table numbers. We used the Ikea double sided Tolsby frames so that one side had the number and the other had a description of that number along with table exercises! That way no one had to do any actual math to find their table (unless they wanted to).

We used stones written with our guests’ names and the table number instead of escort cards. At the end of the night our guests left their stones in a basket for Matt and I to use in our garden.

For example, one of the table numbers was “e” with this description on the back:

e, a.k.a. Euler’s number, a.k.a. Napier’s Constant, is an irrational number of fundamental importance. While it lacks the general public awareness of a number like , I assure you it is no less charming. Typically defined as the limit       e enjoys many other identities, including

and

e also determines the base of the exponential function , unique among all exponential functions in the study of calculus because it is equal to its own derivative.

Table exercises!

1. Use one of the identities above to verify that e < 3.

2. Use one of the identities above to verify that e is irrational, i.e. that it cannot be written as a ratio p/q where p and q are integers.

3. Suppose each of you has brought a hat to this wedding. Everyone leaves his or her hat inside, and when a person leaves, he can’t be bothered to search for the hat he brought, and simply takes one from the hat pile at random. Show that the probability nobody ends up with the hat they came in with tends to 1/e as the number of people increases.

You can see all the table numbers over at my hubby’s blog. I hope I haven’t bored you all, just wanted to share a fun way we tried to make a detail feel like “us” Did you do anything like this with your table numbers?