Cheap Wedding Invitations

Printing your own invitations may or may not be a route you may take to save money on your wedding. If you are computer savvy, this task should be manageable for you. If you are computer challenged, it may be best to go through a printer or company to print your invitations for you. You will save yourself a lot of time and headache. Creating and printing your own invitations can take 3 - 5 hours. If you do decide to print your own invitations and response cards, like I did, here are a few tips.

Paper Selection - It is easiest to go with a one sheet invitation instead of a folded one. One sheet invitations are more common nowadays anyway.

MS Word - MS Word is probably the best program for creating an invitation because of the wide selection of fonts available. Try to stick with an easy to read, block font (I like Century Gothic), not a cursive font. Why? Because you want your guests to easily read the details of where and when your wedding is. Make them work hard at reading your invitation and they may get some of the details confused.

Wording - Select the best wording for your invitation by doing a search online. Here are some wording samples.

Spell Check - Check and double check, then triple check the spelling of all names and wording. Have several people look at it to verify. This is your wedding invitation, after all.

Layout - Keep it simple by justifying to the middle. Make sure everything fits within 1/2 inch of the edge, on all sides, of the invitation for best results, depending on your printer.

Test Print - Use thin printer paper to do a test print. You can then place this sheet over your blank invitation to see if the formatting works on your invitation. When you are ready to print the real thing, do another test print, this time on your invitation paper. This is where extra sheets of invitations come in handy. You can also test out how to best feed the paper into your printer.

Printer Settings - Set your ink settings to best quality and select the right weight of your invitation paper, usually this will be heavyweight.

Printing the Invitations - When you are ready to print all of your invitations, I highly suggest printing 5 sheets at a time. Usually, there will be 2 invitations per sheet so you will be printing 10 invitations at a time. You can check how your printer handles high volume printing. Sometimes the paper will feed wrong when printing multiple copies, especially with heavyweight paper. It's also best to stand by your printer while it prints to correct any feeding errors. You'll see what I mean. This may sound tedious, but what will you do if your printer printed 20 invitations wrong and you weren't able to catch the error? You would have to buy more invitations and this would cost you more time.

Response Cards - Don't forget to print your response cards. Formatting and wording this may be just as challenging as your invitation. Here are some ideas.

Cheap Wedding Cakes

Cake Included? - Depending on your reception venue, your cake may be included with your package. This is common in hotels and can save you time searching for a cake vendor. Sometimes though, they can refund you an amount for cake if you choose an outside vendor. My friend had this option, to get back $2000 to use an outside vendor or go with the preferred cake vendor, who was a well known for elaborate and delicious cakes. He chose to go with the preferred cake vendor and got a beautiful, ornately decorated cake. If that was me I would have taken the $2000 back and gotten a cheaper cake for $300! Yes, my actual wedding cake costed under $300. I would have used the $1700 for something else.

Save on your cake - Wedding cakes can range anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars. If you want to trim your budget on your wedding cake, keep the design as simple as possible. Our wedding cake was simple white with 3 tiers with no gaps in between the tiers. Adding texture designs and colors onto the frosting adds to the cost. I've seen a lot of wedding cakes where the cake was decorated only with flowers like roses or orchids. Fresh flowers look better than piped flowers and look more modern. Our colors were dark pink and brown so we added a ribbon to the base of each tier to add color to our cake. The bakery didn't charge any extra for adding the ribbon which I supplied to them. It's a simple, inexpensive touch that I loved.

Display Cake - Keep in mind that the display cake is just that, for display and cake cutting. It need not be big enough to feed every guest. We got a display cake that fed about 94 people, the photo on the right. Then we had a few sheet cakes which cost only $75 a sheet and fed 50 people. The display cake cost the most, more than a sheet cake, obviously. So if you get a smaller display cake and purchase a few sheet cakes you can save a lot. The bakery will do the sheet cakes for you.

Number of Slices - The bakery will charge you based on the number of slices. The cost per slice on the display cake is a lot more than for a sheet cake. The bakery told us to account for only 80% of our guests eating cake, which is about right, because some guests simply don't eat cake. We felt better going with enough slices of cake for all of our guests. We had about 140 guests so we chose a display cake that had 94 slices, then added 1.5 sheet cakes (75 slices). It was more than enough, but also keep in mind that sometimes your reception venue will save the top portion of your display cake for you to bring home. So that 94 slices for our display cake wasn't really 94 slices for our guests.

Cake Flavors - We really enjoyed taste testing different flavors for our wedding cake and we got to take the samples home. We loved 2 cake flavors but settled on only one flavor for our wedding cake because we heard stories of when multiple cake flavors were available, guests would request more than one slice of cake, to try all of the flavors. So if you choose multiple flavors, then order more cake slices to accommodate this.

Cake Disaster - As someone who has been to countless weddings, I have actually seen a cake collape! This cake had 5 layers , with each tier held up by wine glasses. Thankfully, the cake was made of styrofoam... kinda odd. They used sheet cakes to serve guests. That's why I always told my clients to stick to cakes with layers stacked on top of each other instead of raised tiers.

Cheap Wedding Ideas

We got married last September and I am glad wedding planning is over. Being a former wedding videographer, I have been to soooo many weddings and got great ideas for our wedding. We set a pretty realistic budget and figured out what was really important to us. With the things low on our priority list, we shopped for deals. Here are some quick ideas. I will expand on each section soon.

Guest List - We had a small guest list, about 140 guests, which saved us a lot of money and gave us more options.

Invitations - We bought simple white, blank invitations at Target and printed them ourselves on the computer. This do-it-yourself approached costed us only $70 vs. $330 on the invitations we would have ordered through Costco, saving us $260.

Wedding Dress - I went to a small boutique which offered wedding dresses for under $1000, which is relatively inexpensive compared to $2000 and up designer dresses. They had a small selection of maybe 20 dresses? But all the dresses were beautiful and elegant looking. And I found "the one" there. They weren't pushy salesepeople but were very helpful.

Flowers - We didn't have to spend as much on flowers to decorate our venue because our reception location was a restaurant right on the water with a spectacular view.

Cake - We went to a bakery that specialized in wedding cakes. We got a smaller display cake that could feed 90 guests and got more inexpensive sheet cakes to cover the rest of our guest list. FYI: The display cake costs more per slice than sheet cakes. And we stuck to one flavor because if you get more than one flavor, guests may take more than one slice of cake and you can end up without enough cake. Also, the bakery told us that 20% of guests do not eat cake. But we ordered enough to feed all guests anyway. To cut costs, we chose a simple plain, white design and decorated the cake with fresh flowers and a brown ribbon at the base of each tier.