save the date dollars and cents

for those of you that liked my save the dates, heres the breakdown in cost of them...

200 printed magnets from vistaprint: $39.99 + $17.81 priority shipping = $57.80

150 A2 sized cards from papersource in mars red: $11.28 + $7.00 shipping = $18.28

120 glue dots from office depot: $4.58 + tax

200 A2 sized envelopes in ivory from office depot: $ 20.98 + tax

300 clear labels from office depot: $ 14.08

grand total: $117.86

what i didn't factor into the budget above is the cost of postage but depending on how many you have to mail out of this country, that number would obviously fluctuate...we also hand delivered a few so yea...in hindsight i could've save a little bit more if i figured out how many i had to make beforehand, but i was working with estimates since i didn't finalize my guestlist yet... i had to guess on how much i needed of everything.

but what obviously cost the most is the time and effort i had to put into all of these guys...the labor effort is PRICELESS!

DIY failure? judge for yourself

alright, so long ago i proclaimed myself a DIY dummie...but because of the time crunch there was just no way i was going to be able to get my save the dates professionally printed...so i had to resort to Do it yourself-dom...it was torture...or i'm just a baby in reality, but considering all pain asides...i thought they turned out quite well...majority of them came out the way i had envisioned...so lets begin shall we?

after our engagement session with Ryan, it took about 3 weeks for me to get the pictures and then to choose a few that i thought would make a good magnet, and then sent them off to Luke for some graphical magic...i loved what he did, and it matched my engagement party invitations! i then sent the artwork out to vista print for magnets to be printed...

this is what they're supposed to look like

these are what came back, actually lets get a close up look
the borders were all cut off a bit...the artwork was formatted so that they were supposed to fit the dimensions of the magnet perfectly, but for whatever reason this didn't work out, but i was too pressed for time to get them reprinted and redone , so i had to make peace with imperfect save the dates...but otherwise the picture quality and color satuation was pretty good i thought...

i then designed a card for these suckers to be mounted to on microsoft word, yes as in the program you used to write those school papers on...no photoshop or some fancy shmancy program for me...this is what i came up with

i formatted the paper size to fit an A2 sized card and landscaped it and voila! insta magnet card

i then ordered some red card stock from paper source in my desired size, which was pretty easy, if i wasn't so fickle and couldn't decide what color to actually make these guys! but i settled on red in the end because well it matched the magnet and it was ON SALE! the fortunate thing was, because it was a shiny card stock, it will only work if i printed it with a laser printer...which i very conveniently have one at home

yep this is the baby that i printed everything on...seee!

the sucky part of my printer was for some reason the feeder is really dumb, so i had to hand feed every single card! yes i had to sit there and individually hand do 150 cards...painful i tell you

and of course like everything i do, there will inevitably be rejects...but not because its my fault, but because i didn't anticipate the printer being this retarded...here let me show you the handful of rejected cards

yea the printer smeared ink on the edges of a few...ugh...ok on second thought it might be my fault for not having the foresight... gah!

but all is not lost, most of them came out perfectly, like so

after all this, how the heck do i affix the magnets to the cards? double stick tape? glue dots? i tried both and they both work...but majority of them were done on glue dots, these guys

i got about 130 of them from office depot, staples didn't have them...but they made assembly easier...i got the idea from weddingbee.com mrs butterfly to design a box onto the card so i wouldn't have to worry about centering the magnets, stuck one of these guys in the box and attached magnet, VOILA! easy peasy

the final product looked like this:

stuffed into envelopes by chris and i , these babies were ready to go out.
i chickened out and printed all the addresses on clear labels instead of writing them all out, yea sue me, they're the save the dates not actual invites =P

so whats your verdict? did i pass or fail on this DIY project?

Save The Dates

for those of you who will remember months and months ago my very awesome friend luke designed our engagement party invitations and was supremely satisfied with them...so of course when it came time to send out these save the dates, i couldn't resist to ask him to do something awesome with our engagement photos...here's a sneak peak at what's to come (since im fairly certain most of my guests don't know about my blog i think it will still remain a surprise to many of them..heehee)