Wedding Dress!!!

Ooooh, this is a good one!

Last Saturday, there was an event in Boston called Brides Against Breast Cancer. Dresses were donated from designers, bridal shops, and (I believe) women who already got married. They were all deeply discounted, and the proceeds went to the Making Memories charity.

I wasn't planning on actually finding a dress because we still have 15 months until the wedding. Also, I didn't know what the selection would be like, or how crowded it would be (my cousin was gearing up for a Running of the Brides event), not to mention how inexpensive the dresses would actually be. Because, let's face it, if a dress is $2000, even 50% off is still $1000.

But we got there and they had several racks full of dresses, many of them ivory, which was my only specification for a wedding dress. There weren't that many people there at all, and I tried on about 10 dresses before I found THE ONE.

I won't post pictures because Dan reads this blog, but here are a couple of pictures of dresses I didn't get:

Not a winner.

This is the best picture of this dress. Please note what a good sport I am, and also that my face doesn't actually look like this.

Too. Much. Dress.

Now, most importantly, prices. I don't know why this event wasn't swarming with people. Maybe they didn't advertise it well enough (I only heard about it from another knitter on Ravelry who was getting married). I tried on several dresses in the $300-400 range. The dress I ended up getting was one of the more pricey ones they had, and it was still only $550, which is what the dresses would have started at if I went to a chain bridal store, never mind an independent shop. Not to mention this money is going to a great cause.

The tag on the dress said it was originally $913, which makes it 40% off. But after poking around online, I found that it actually sold for around $1200. So, I win.

Total Money Spent: $577.72
Money Left to Spend: $4422.28

Save the Date

Our save-the-date postcards came in!

The print version of this has a lot more text on it, but I took out our contact info.

I knew I wanted to design them myself, so the cost came down to how I printed them. I thought about printing them myself, but between the cost of blank cards and ink cartridges, and the time spent in an inevitable fight with my printer trying to make it print double-sided cards, it just wouldn't be worth it.

I've printed things through Vistaprint before, and was happy with the results, so I decided they were the least expensive route. The trick to Vistaprint is that you should NEVER pay full price. If you sign up for their emails, you can usually get 35-50% off if you're willing to wait a week or two for your particular item to go on sale.

A few weeks ago, I ordered their free wedding sample packet (which I recommend if you are thinking about ordering through them. Gives you a great idea of what to expect, and a steady flow of coupons and sales). Since then, my emails from them have been mostly wedding related, which is both useful and a pleasant change of pace from the usual emails they send me, which are about stickers to cover the entire side of my car to promote my knit design business (not the most effective marketing tool for knitting patterns, but a nice try) and free loyalty cards (as in buy 10 cups of coffee, get one free, but for knitting. Also not effective). They sent me an email announcing their "secret" bridal sale, and since we had just gotten our date from the church, I jumped on the opportunity. They came out exactly how I wanted them to!

Here's the breakdown:

1. We are only sending save-the-dates to family members, members of the wedding party, and people who we definitely want to come but live far away. This cuts down on the number we have to order. I ordered 50, to have a few extras in case I made mistakes addressing them. Normally $32.99 for 50, I got them for $21.24.

2. When I designed the postcard, I purposely made the back in grayscale. Vistaprint does not charge any extra to print in black and white on the back side of the card, so I avoided a fee that way.

3. Vistaprint's save-the-dates are not necessarily postcards, I just designed ours that way. But because that is not the standard, they include free white envelopes with the order. This saves money later on, because we can use them for thank you notes, RSVP returns, etc.

4. Shipping was free. They said it would take two weeks for them to come in, which was fine because I was in no hurry and the faster options were expensive. I placed the order and got them six days later. Seriously. Seven-day shipping costs $13.68, and I got them in less time for free. Don't pay for shipping unless you actually need them, like, the next day.

5. This is the one downfall: by designing them myself, I was charged uploading fees for the front and the back images, because I didn't use their designs. The two fees together only came to around $7, and I decided I had saved enough money on the sale that I could justify it. There were no designs on the site that went with our colors, or our idea of the wedding as a whole (which, admittedly, is a sparse and sporadic vision right now).

Including tax, (but not including the cost of actually mailing the postcards, which I will include later when I figure it out), the postcards came out to $27.72.


Money Spent: $27.72
Money Left to Spend: $4972.28

Engagement Shoot!

I talked in my last post about utilizing services that our friends have offered us. A friend of ours, who is trying to get her photography business up and running, offered to do our engagement pictures for us. Her name is Josephine Cardin, and her work can be found here. Maybe I'm biased, but she did an absolutely brilliant job!
Some of my favorites:

© Josephine Cardin Photography

© Josephine Cardin Photography

© Josephine Cardin Photography

Jo did as good a job as any photographer who has been in business for a long time, if not better! I read a lot about this when I was researching wedding planning, how it's a great money saver to ask people who aren't quite professionals yet, or who are even students. As far as students go, I really love the idea of giving someone a chance to get into the field.

Money Spent: $0
Money Left to Spend: $5000

An Introduction, Of Sorts

There are so many blogs about weddings on a budget. So. Many. And every time I find a new one, I am filled with hope, only to find out, basically every time, that a "budget" wedding is somewhere around $10,000.

Um. Okay.

My fiance and I are 21-year-old college students, and we are getting married in the fall of 2012. We are paying for the wedding ourselves, and even with over a year to prepare for it, our budget is set FIRMLY at $5000. I have more college loans than I care to think about, but even if we had all of the money in the world, neither of us are the type of people to want to spend thousands of dollars on a day that, while important, is not more important than the marriage itself. It makes more sense to use that money on, say, the rest of our lives.

Luckily, I'm quite the little DIY-er, and excel at buying things on clearance or with coupons. I have both my rubber stamps and my inDesign skills at the ready! We are also blessed with many great friends who have already offered their services. I am confident that we can craft a beautiful wedding for with this amount of money, and, quite frankly, I'm pretty excited for the challenge!