My First Bundle of {Wedding} Joy

My second post of December!  That is worthy of a Bad Blogger Award.

Nevertheless, we got a present from Vistaprint the other day!

A couple of months ago, I got an email from Groupon for a free $20 towards any purchase.  I have never made a Groupon purchase, so they have been trying to suck me in via free offers.  They started out at $10, climbed to $15 and peaked at $20.  It just so happened that there was a Vistaprint offer going on at the same time:  $54 value for $14 or $84 value for $24.  Since I had the $20 credit, I went for the $84 dollar offer, spending a whopping $4.

I raided the website high and low.  I tossed around the idea of getting some personalized gifts for my bridesmaids, but settled on:  

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Save-the-Dates...

(official reveal post coming soon)

...address labels (some to use now and some for after the wedding)...

...envelope seals...

...and business cards turned Picture-Sharing Information Cards.

The Save-the-Date cards I designed by myself and uploaded it as a JPEG using their blank template. The address labels and envelope seals were their own designs and I just slapped our information on them.   The business cards are actually their free ones (you get 250 as long as you don't want to do any editing to the template).  I just used the fields to put our Photobucket information on them rather than an address/phone/website/etc.

I plan on putting business cards in with the favor bags or leaving them on the tables for the guests to pick up at the reception.  I don't mind having people post the pictures to Facebook, but I would rather have them in a centralized place and then anyone can sign in, upload their own and look at the others (and they were FREE).

I think everything was on sale, but our original price would have been $97.21 for everything.  Since shipping is not covered by the groupon deal, I paid $14.32.  Add the $4 that I spent on the groupon and the total comes to $18.32 for everything!  Not too shabby.  Overall, I was pretty happy with the quality.  The printing is done well.  The only thing that I was disappointed in was the tiny font on my address labels and the date on the envelope seals.  Both of them look clear and defined online, but what we received wasn't quite so crisp.  It doesn't really stand out and kind of fades into the background.  If I had known this, I would have made the print larger.  It wasn't a big enough deal for me to call them, but I've heard that they have great customer service in the event that you care more than I do!

At this point now, I am working on addressing the Save-the-Dates so we can send those puppies out!  We got lots of wedding-related questions at Christmas so I probably should have sent them out a little sooner, but I've been busy! Aaand I still have a partially incomplete list of who we are actually inviting to the wedding fo' sho...so I've been stalling.

Anyways, hope you had a great Christmas.  Sorry for the terrible blog post...you get a little bit of everything in a big jumbled mess!

Guest Book Table - Wedding Day Modelogues #1

With our guest book having arrived a few weeks ago, it is now time for the 1st Wedding Day Modelogue blog post!

When we initially started planning this here wedding, we knew we would be doing a lot of DIY.  When we signed our lease contract with the reception hall, the Wareham, they told us that we would be able to use the hall for 4 hours on the day before the wedding (Friday) to set up decorations and such.  HOWever, if someone chooses to book the Wareham the day/night before, then we are out of luck. We can pay $450 to reserve it ourselves for an entire second day, but Mom and I discussed that this summer and she'd rather see that money be spent elsewhere than adding to the reception hall bill.  While I didn't really want to put the burden on my family to help set up decorations on our wedding day, she went ahead and volunteered them for duty.  So in the event that we cannot set up the day before, I needed a way to be organized enough that someone else could follow and recreate my ideas.  Hence, the Modelogues.

The idea behind the Modelogues is for me to set up the decorations (exactly as I want them to look) and take a picture.  I am going to include the pictures in with the materials so that someone can pick up a box that says cake table, open it, and find all the supplies for the table and the "model" picture for the set-up.

The first Modelogue is actually not for the reception, but it is the only table/set-up that I have all the parts to and is actually complete.  Wanting to bask in my productiveness, I went ahead and deemed it good enough for a Modelogue and set it up as desired for the wedding:

Please excuse the snowmen.  They are not welcome at the wedding.  Nowhere in my house did I have a white tablecloth or a white sheet, so I had to improvise.  We are planning on renting our linens from our caterer, so I'll just have to throw one in the box with the other supplies and we are set!


I'm not sure what size of tables the church has, but if they are any bigger than what I have, the guest table might look a little sparse.  I suppose we could throw some paper hearts, rose petals or tealight candles around and that would probably fill it in a bit.

And to store it all, I have been slowly stealing paper ream boxes from work:

...and I added a label and check list that look like this:

I imagine that the check list for each box is going to change, so I wrote the Xs in pencil so that I can move items around but not have to re-write the entire list.  It's a nice way to visually see what you have purchased/still need and also have it organized together.


So what do you think of the 1st Official Wedding Modelogue?  Any opinions on the guest table set-up?  Any other ideas to spruce up the guest book table?