Weddingbee Blog

We decided that we wanted to send out save the dates, as a lot of people we are inviting are not from around here. We met with a little opposition from Cinnamum, who said that all the relatives and family friends on my side of the family already know about the wedding and that a card that wasn’t an invitation would confuse some of my older relatives. I can’t remember Cinnamon Buns’s mum saying anything directly against the idea, but she also said that most people on that side of the family knew already. Cinnamum has suggested a few times that if we did want to go along with this crazy idea, wouldn’t e-mail work? Her suggestions were to design something on the computer and e-mail it, or make one physical card, take a photo of it, and then send that attached to an e-mail.

We might not be the most traditional people, and we are definitely computer and gadget people, but we both still want to send out something tangible in the mail. Something people can stick to their fridge or bulletin board (or in the recycling bin, I suppose). To show our love of books, and to continue with what is rapidly becoming a book-themed wedding, there is this one:

by Ellothere on Etsy

This Etsy seller will customize these with your colours and words and can also print the back as a postcard! At first, I was really into the idea of a postcard—I wanted to save at least some trees, and these totally don’t need envelopes!

Cute as that book one is, we’ve both moved on to the idea of a card with pretty photos of us—and what a great excuse to get engagement photos! This is our favourite so far:

by FoosieDesign on Etsy

We like the idea of the big photo being our faces, and then for the smaller ones, maybe a cute closeup of our hands or feet, or just one little detail from the shoot. This particular seller just sells you the digital file, and then we can get it printed wherever we want here, which saves on shipping charges. It is a fairly simple design, but we both think the $15 is totally worth someone else worrying about alignment and all that jazz.

All was well and good, until I stumbled upon this treasure trove:

by ButtonEmpire on Etsy

I saw, I wanted. They are one-inch pin-back buttons made of of a book of love poetry. Could it be any more perfect? It seemed like I turned around and all of a sudden our wedding has a book theme (many more posts on that to come!). And so these…these! I racked my brain trying to think of how to incorporate them. Pin them to the fabric on the jam jars? Scatter them on tables and hope people pick them up? A basket of them? Then I saw that buttonempire also does magnets. And so, a great but not terribly well-advised idea popped into my brain. We could get those save the dates we want, some non-permanent glue dots, a bag of these pins-turned-magnets, and then stick one magnet to each card. That way people would have a card and a means with which to stick it to their fridge! I thought it might be cute to stick the magnet over the date so that they pull it off, and surprise! The date!

Have I mentioned buttonempire is located in the same province as me? I love it when things like that happen. Finding Canadian Etsy sellers also helps when asking them questions about Canada Post. I wanted to know what one magnet would weigh, to see if it would be heavy enough to up the postage if it was popped into an envelope (Envelopes?!? What about the trees?!) with a card. And buttonempire, having dealt with the terror that is Canada Post, said that it isn’t so much the weight as the thickness of the magnet that tips it over the edge into bad-postage land. It doesn’t fit through the slot of doom. Having been an Etsy seller myself, I have experienced the slot of doom—watching the Canada Post employee trying to fit packages through the sheet of acrylic with standard-size slots is always a little nerve-wracking. The magnets up the postage from $0.57 in Canada / $1.70 international to $1.22 in Canada / $4 international!

My marvelous, theme-appropriate, adorable idea would more than double our postage costs, not to mention the added cost of the magnets themselves. I was willing to suck those things up and say, “Oh, it’s just a drop in the bucket of wedding expenses,” until a few days later when I made a proper wedding budget and filled in all our quotes and guesses versus what our parents have offered so far. And then I had an aneurysm looking at the total Excel had made for me.

It looks like love-poetry magnets will not make it into our day, which still makes me a little sad every time I see this picture. Every now and then, I think, “If we hand-delivered all the ones we possibly could…” But only 19 guests/couples are here in town. That leaves 18 more in Canada and 17 international to send out.

I could insist on it and pay the extra from my own personal bank account, but I don’t want to do that too much or the wedding costs would really start racking up!

I’m sure many brides have also had things they needed talking down from. Any things you want to reminisce over? Or should I bite the bullet and just get them because they’re perfect?