Over budget and under to-do listed

Now that I've spent about $550 on wedding invitations (out of a $750 stationery budget... wait, that can't be right; that leaves much too much room—I must have lowered that portion of the budget to accommodate our photographer or something), I'm trying to think of what else we will need and where else the paper budget is going to come bursting out of the seams and how to reign it in.

The primary additional expense to consider is postage. We have 94 invitations to send (so I might as well budget for a hundred). A small handful of those (probably six or seven) are international, so that will probably come out to between $10 and $15 (we won't stamp their RSVP postcards). But 100 invitations at, what, $0.80 each? maybe? plus 100 RSVP postcards at $0.29 each, I think, adds another $109 to the total... so we're sitting at about $675. That leaves us a whopping $75 to come up with everything else: invitation accessories (the envelope liners and directions inserts), thank you cards, ceremony programs, menus, escort cards and place cards. Yeah, we will not be on budget for this, unfortunately.

The first thing to go is going to be the envelope liners. They are a lot of work, little pay off (will anyone notice them, other than me?), and an unnecessary expense. Good-bye, envelope liners. :( I hardly knew ye.

But we need directions cards. Our venue's mailing address doesn't match their actual location, and there are four parking lots—only one of which our guests should be parking in. I can't leave these out, and they shouldn't cost very much, anyway. If I really need to cut costs, I can do this on white printer paper instead of matching ecru card stock. Although I'm not sure how much money that will save, since I'm going to need that card stock to make our thank you cards... and I guess I need envelopes and postage for those, too! Argh!

There's no way around place cards if we want to tell people where to sit (and with 150 guests, we want to tell people where to sit), but we might do a large printed seating chart if that turns out to be more cost effective than separate escort cards. And while I'm ambivalent about the menus—we are only giving RSVP choices of "beef," "chicken," or "vegetarian" (the website will provide more detail, but who will check the website?), but they are more work, more money, and more dead trees—I think the programs are crucial. The problem I've had is figuring out how to get as much information as we need onto one sheet of paper (or, barring that, attractively binding the pages together). Enter: the layered program.

(source, tutorial and template)

I don't know how much work this will be, or how much paper it will take, but D has promised to help me cut card stock and tie ribbons, which makes me feel a little better about taking on the project.

I expect to go about $100 over budget in this category by the time I'm done. We'll see how it goes! (Anyone have a cheap A1 size invitation source?)