Selecting The Perfect Invitation

Yesterday after I left work I headed to the theater to meet my mom, Marine Mom, and Marine Sister to see a matinée ~ The Bounty Hunter.

A reporter trying to cover a story, mystery, intrigue, and a sexy guy = A great movie in my book. I ♥ it! Gerard Butler has got to be one of the hottest guys around. The eyes, the smile, the voice, the abs.... yeah he is pretty much the total package!

After the movie the four of us decided to grab a bite to eat. It is great that my mom and Marine's mom get a long so well. And it was fun going to do something with them and Marine Sis.

After diner we went to Michael's to look at Wedding Invitations. I had already found some that I liked but I thought I would let them see them before making a final decision.

I had already decided to go with "Do-It-Yourself" (DIY) Invitations in order to save money. I mean have you looked at wedding invitations? Ridiculous! I found some that I really, really, really liked but they were $2.50 a piece. I need at least 100 invitations so before tax that would be $250. That is a lot of money for a simple piece of paper.

And Marine and I have set a wedding budget of $5,000. Marine has bet that I will go over this amount. I on the other hand love a challenge and I love to win. So unbeknown-est to Marine I have set myself a new goal just to see how cheap I can possibly go to have a nice, yet simple wedding.

Because instead of putting money toward the wedding I would rather put it toward other things such as new furniture or fixing up the house. Also if I win the bet Marine has to buy me a new flash for my Cannon Rebel ($329 value ~ something I desperately want, but refuse to shell out the money to buy.). If he wins he gets to gloat for the rest of our lives that he was right.

So as you can clearly see I cannot let him win.

Michael's is great about coupons - and who doesn't love coupons? All you have to do is sign up for their mailing list. Last week was customer appreciation week, take 50% off any one regularly priced item. That knocked my invitations down to $19.99 box, 30 invitations per box.

Thursday night I bought only one box but that night made Marine Sister, Babbles, and another Girlfriend all sign up for Michael's mailing list in order to receive the coupons. Friday night coupons in hand we returned to Michael's and purchased three additional boxes of invitations.

Four boxes would give me a total of 120 invitations, plenty to cover the list and leave extras to place in the wedding scrapbook etc. These four boxes should have cost me $171.16 but thanks to my bargain shopping I was able to cut the final cost down to $85.56.

Very budget friendly!

Here is a picture of the invitations:

The picture is not very good, but you get the gist. They are ivory and black and have a white ribbon at the top. Instead of the white ribbon though I am going to use red. Since Marine is wanting to wear his dress blues our colors are going to be red and black..... because... well nothing else really looks good next to the uniform.

And for less than 100 dollars and I'm very excited about the invitations, which also include response cards and thank you notes.

I went ahead and purchased the matching guest book to. Which has blank pages just like I was wanting so that I can make it a photo guestbook.


All this for less than 100 bucks... I'd say I'm off to a good start on winning this bet!

Chandler: Did you do it on our invitations?

Ross: Not at the ones we sent out.

Chandler: So, just the ones you gave back to us and we had framed!

~ Friends ~