MOAR PAPER LANTERNS!

After my success with AsianIdeas.com, I thought it would be a good idea to go back and find more stars and possibly also find some gold and blue lanterns.

As I'm clicking away and set to order, I get the good idea to do some price checking and lo and behold, I find the same blue and gold lanterns on PaperLanternStore.com, only around 50 cents cheaper per lantern.  So I keep the same 5 star lanterns in the AsianIdeas.com shopping cart, and get ten each of the blue and gold circular paper lanterns from PLS.com.  I mean, they're all the same damn thing anyhow, right?

Well, kind of.

Here's where I made my first mistake: I checked out of the tried and true place first.

Your only options for shipping through PaperLanternStore were expensive and restricted to FedEx only.  AsianIdeas uses USPS Priority Mail, which is cheaper and ships faster than the standard option presented by PLS.com unless you want to add even more money to your order to expedite shipping.  So sure, I ended up saving about $10 on the lanterns by ordering through PLS.com, but any savings I received went straight to shipping.  Point in favor of AsianIdeas.com.

Also, when considering total time it took for the order to process and ship, I again have to nod my hat to AsianIdeas.com.  It took a grand total of four days for me to get my order from them.  It took over a week for the lanterns from PLS.com to arrive.  And remember- I paid more for shipping.

As far as the product quality goes, it's hard to compare since we're talking cardstock star-shaped lanterns and the thinner, circular lanterns.  But both seem adequate as far as quality goes, and for that, it's just about an even tie.

Overall, I think going forward I'd keep ordering from AsianIdeas.com.  They were faster and cheaper from start to finish, and seemed to offer better sales on what I needed.  The star lanterns I picked out were I believe $7 originally, but I purchased them for $2.50 each.  Not too shabby.  Had the lanterns not been on sale, I would have spent WAY more than what I should have at AsianIdeas.

I'll NEVER do that again.

Make jewelry, that is. At least not the beaded crap that I love to wear and figured the girls could wear at the wedding

I've successfully created four necklaces for the maids, and one for myself. I still have yet to do something for the flower girls, but I'm trying to figure out what I'd need for beads since I'm just about out. Sigh.

They look great as long as you don't look too close, and I can't guarantee they'll hold through dancing. But as long as they last through pictures, that's almost all I care about.

Here is mine, the one with silver and pearls, and everyone else's. in my head they looked a lot different. In real life? Not so much.

Jewelry DIY- not as easy as I'd hoped

I know what you're thinking.  It should be easy enough to DIY some strings of beads and make them look like what I'm hoping them to look like-- right?

Well, yes and no.

The idea itself is really simple.  Just put things together and go at it.  But it seems like the advice I received on the internet just wasn't up to par-- shocker.  That's of no fault to Fire Mountain Gems (which, by the way, has EXCELLENT shipping times and customer service)-- they didn't give me that recommendation.  They recommended wire.  But the internet tutorials from other sites looked SO EASY with this stuff, and I know how I am when I'm drinking, so... yeah.

First, multiple sites recommended using Powercord.  I don't know if the assumption was that glass beads weren't as heavy, and the stretchiness of the cord would be beneficial, but not for my purposes.  These glass beads are heavy as hell.  And yes, the Powercord droops.  Especially with a ton of weight on it.  Which these beads have.

And overall, I'm not sure if I just didn't expect the necklaces to look like this, or what... but they kind of remind me of Indian corn.  They've had positive reviews from those I've shown them to, but they're still not what I'm hoping to do.

Today's plan?  Giving it the old college try with some string and not worrying about using more beads than are necessary to get the look I want.  I can always go and buy more beads.  It's not ideal, but it can be done.

Another money saving tip for wedding planning: Invites

Invitations are another place the cost can quickly escalate far beyond what you expected.

To keep the cost down we've taken a few steps that I thought were easy enough to do yourself, and good to share.

Save the Date Cards:
I found an online design that I fell in love with. A good friend of mine does graphic design, so I asked her if she could help me put together a similar design and print it. I could have just printed them myself on photo paper or card stock after the design was finished, but since she had access to printers at work and work was slow, she helped a sista out.

Invitations:
Again, I found a design I liked online and rather than order them off Etsy for $38 per set of 5 invites (for a total of around $500 to do 65 invites), asked the same friend to help me put a design together that was similar. I feel the need to say that 1) my invite design is much different than the one that inspired me, so theres no IP infringement and 2) had budget not been an issue, I would have gone for the Etsy invites.

After that, we headed to Paper Source in Porter Square (Cambridge, MA) to look at the different types of paper and the different colors available. I used to live walking distance from Paper Source, and I've always LOVED them. But after this experience, I love them even more.

We decided on a dark blue trifold outer and antique gold backing to fit behind an off-white printed invite. The response cards are going to be the same off white (no backing) as the invite, and the envelopes are the same antique gold as the backing. I will punch out stars to "seal" the trifold closed, and purchased white gel pens to address the envelopes.

I needed to order some stuff from home and have it shipped here in NC since it wasn't in store, and one of the ladies at Paper Source told me that if I called one of their stores directly and placed the order through them, that shipping was free. I initially wasn't going to bother and just order on the web until I realized I saved myself in the neighborhood of $30 by calling them.

I also skipped on the inner envelope. While it is creating some interesting invite addressing woes, it was a savings of at least $30, not including the extra postage that an odd-shaped envelope would require.

The total cost for all my paper goods to make 65 invites was $150, and manpower to put it all together.

Now that I have the design, I could pay $65 for printing, or I could print it myself on my super photo printer. As long as it doesn't smudge and the card stock can go through your printer without looking funny, it should be ok. Then once it is printed, all that's left is gluing the invites together and mailing them out.

Even with paying $65 for the printing, I'm still saving over $300 on my invites based on that initial price of the similar Etsy invite.