*Note: I wrote this post back in 2017 before our wedding, but ended up needing (a lot of) time to feel somewhat sane again. Just kidding. I’m not sane even at baseline.
To be completely honest with you all…I feel sick every time I look at our wedding costs. Right now, we’re in a place where all the vendors are booked, and there’s very little wiggle room for saving. I’ve found that there’s so much give-and-take in wedding planning. You have to splurge on what’s important to you, and scrimp on what isn’t. Take for instance, photography. We D E F I N I T E L Y splurged on photography. Outside of marrying my best friend and being surrounded by the people we love, this was the most important aspect of the wedding for me – making sure our memories were captured in the best way possible.
When it came to our save-the-dates, I wanted them to look nice, but didn’t see any reason to spend $3/piece for gold foil press for HUNDREDS of cards. Cause, everyone throws them away. Don’t get me wrong, I love foil and if we had an unlimited budget, I would totally go for those beautiful, hand-pressed cards.
The lowest price that I found on online was ~$0.30/each, (not including $9 shipping) from Vistaprint. We’ve used them before for grad announcements, engagement party invites, business cards, etc, and have never been disappointed. I was about to pull the trigger because that’s still a pretty good deal, when I saw that Walgreens was having a special for photo prints: $0.20/each for 4×6 prints + an extra 50% off coupon when you buy 75+ prints.
I thought to myself, I could totally make my own save-the-dates and print them as 4×6 photos! Ever since I got my Cricut, I’ve amassed a huge collection of fonts. So, I took the photo we were using, put it into Photoshop, and added the text layer right on top. For those of you who don’t have Photoshop, I’m sure you could do this with just about any photo editor. It was difficult to find a font color that was legible against the colors in the photos, so I ended up fading in an opaque layer at the bottom to add details. (*Present Time: Now, in retrospect, I don’t love my font choices and colors, but honestly – does anyone still have a copy of this besides us? Hah!)
Luckily, you can print as many single prints as you want from Walgreens, because it took me a few tries to make one we could all agree on, and where the text wasn’t too close to the edges. Please disregard the horrible polka dot laminate counters – they’ve since been replaced with quartz!
The photo “cards” cost us $0.10/piece and the nice guy at the photo counter gave me free card envelopes! If you happen to not get so lucky, though, Amazon has a ton of options for the A4 envelopes – even pretty kraft ones for about $0.14/piece.
When so many of the photo save-the-dates you see online are around $1.50/each, it’s a huge cost savings to DIY when you need as many as we do! If you don’t see a good coupon running for Walgreens Photos, just be patient – they always cycle them back around. Hope this helps someone stick to their budget! I also made rose gold foil invitation suites – more on that later in the wedding series!
