My Garter

Though I am not the biggest fan of the garter toss and even though we haven't decided if we're doing it or not, I went ahead and bought a garter on ebay from http://stores.ebay.com/Avys-Bridal-Boutique. I think it's pretty sweet. It was free shipping and only cost $11.99.

I LOVE YOU, mail merge tool

Because I am anal about these invitations and I have convinced myself I am not going to have anyone RSVP with an extra uninvited yest guest I have decided to make individual RSVPs. Each couple will have an RSVP with their actual names on it. There's going to be no fill-in-the-blanks with your flavor of the week or adding your 2 year old brat child to the guest list. None of that. The names on the RSVP are the names of the people that are invited to the wedding. NO ONE ELSE.

After making that decision a long time ago, I knew tackling them would be another story. In my own mind I thought it was going to be the easiest thing ever. Make a template of what I wanted it to look like and then throw each guests name in. Print them out one by one and, tada, I would be done. Yea...not so much.

I didn't want to use 120 different pieces of paper when I could get by on 40 or so. Killing innocent trees just to finish these invitations would be wrong. I put a post up on P&E on The Knot and a wonderful woman "Terribridelee" gave me step by step instructions on how to mail merge. This saved me hours of work and about 50 pieces of cardstock. Thanks, Terri, you ROCK!

Once I have more time on my hands I will post step by step instructions with screen shots so everyone will know how to do it.

Another invitations post...

So, over the weekend I had a bit of free time, which never typically happens. I managed to finish all my taping and stuffing. I still have to figure out a way to make my RSVPs without using another 100 pieces of paper or so. I am making individual RSVPs with each guests' name instead of a generic 'fill-in-the-blank' type of RSVP.

I cannot figure out for the life of me how to tackle my RSVPs. I am using publisher for everything else so I kinda want to stick with MS Publisher. I want to be able to print 4-6 RSVPs per sheet of paper. It would be easy if I was printing the exact same thing, then I could just switch the # of copies per sheet, but I want to be able to change the guest's name in each one.

Basically I am trying to figure out how to duplicate the RSVP 6 times on the piece of paper and be able to go in, change the guest's name on the RSVP, add the crop and bleed marks and print them out. I CANNOT FIGURE OUT HOW TO DO IT!! I will welcome any help.

Birdcage Veil--Finally done

Bharnett on the Boston Knot board recommended an etsy.com seller (qgdesigns) who made custom veils. I wanted a birdcage, but didn't really like the whole flower or feather deal. I wanted something very simple and not over the top. She had a crystal hair comb that I really liked and I asked her if you could possibly make a birdcage veil with the hair comb and the netting I liked. I've waited over a month for this piece and I am so happy with it. You can detach the netting from the comb, which is great seeing as I am am definitely not going to want to wear the netting all day.

Accomodations=Accommodations HUGE MISTAKE #1

If you look at my inserts below you will notice I spelled 'accommodations' incorrectly. Pretty sweet that I realized this when I was standing in line at Staples right before I was about to get all 65 pages of inserts professionally cut. What is NOT SWEET is that I wasted 65 pieces of linen paper and pretty much half an ink cartridge printing out misspelled inserts. If you read one of my below posts you would know that when printing my inserts I put my printer on 'maximum DPI' print setting which prints at a very high resolution, except that it takes about 5 minutes per sheet of paper. 65 x 5 mins=5.5 hours or so WASTED on printing something that I ended up in the recycle bin.

My fiance will not let me live this one down. He knows I am a spelling Nazi, so he thought it was funny that myself nor spell check picked up on this HUGE mistake.

How did spell check not pick this up, you ask? Well, I used 2 text boxes when making the insert. 1 text box I made like 2 weeks ago and then I went back and did text box #2 yesterday. 1 text box that said 'accommodations' and another text box with the actual pertinent information about the accommodations. Before I printed I ran spell check, but I forgot that I actually had 2 text boxes and I only ran spell check on the first on. Hence, the reason why spell check never picked it up.

In hindsight it could have been way, way, way worse. I could have had them all cut at Staples which would have been a waste of about $10, taped them onto my cover stock and wasted about 60 pages of cover stock ($16 or so). Or even worse---MAILED THEM OUT!!!!!!!!!!!! All-in-all, not a very bad mistake. Crisis averted.

Inserts

I finally finished the directions and accommodations inserts. This is what they look like. I am printing them out myself, having the cut at Staples, and then attaching them to leaf green card stock from Paper Source as a backing.

New phone..NICE

Seeing as my friends are pretty anti-social and prefer texting over just picking up the damn phone and calling me, I have been persuaded to get a phone with a keyboard to make texting these said friends much easier. Why, you ask? Well, because texting on small phones when you have long fingernails is pretty much impossible and T9 blows ass. When you try to type 'beer' into my cell phone it comes up as 'adds.' I don't know about you, but I text the word 'beer' a helluva lot more than I text 'adds.'

Paul and I got matching cell phones and finally got our asses onto a family plan. Yes, I know the matching cell phone thing is lame as hell, but we got an awesome deal so it was hard to pass up. Today when I return home from work I should have 2 nice shiny new Samsung Glydes sitting on my doorstep.

Now, the next time I text 'adds' instead of 'beer' it's probably because I've had too much beer and can't spell correctly.

Update on the tape

So after a while or searching today I came across a seller on Amazon selling 6 roll packs for $1.01. Yes, that's right, like .15 cents a piece. That's AWESOME! I ordered 30 rolls just to be safe. I think it came up to $15 or so with shipping. I don't think I'll be bitching about tape ever again.

Double sided tape

Yes, you might think it's ridiculous that I am posting about double sided tape, but I thought it was necessary. I have 120 invitations to make. And no, I cannot use glue-dots for this, otherwise I would. Thanks to everyone who insisted I used glue dots, but they look like shit.

Thing I need to tape:

• 120 5.5 x 5.5 invitation mats (green card stock) to metallic pocketfold
• 120 5.25 x 5.25 invitations to invitation mat
• directions insert (text weight ivory linen paper) to card stock backing
• accommodations insert (text weight ivory linen paper) to card stock backing
• RSVP (text weight ivory linen paper) to card stock backing

So far I have taped all 120 invitations mats to the pocketfolds and taped about 70 directions inserts to the card stock backing and I've used 8 friggen rolls of tape. I will, at minimum, need another 15-20 rolls of tape to finish. So far I've bought all the tape at the dollar store close to my house, but now they're sold out and will not reorder it for me. I've gone to 4 other dollar stores and nothing.

Every single other place I have looked it costs like $3.50 a roll. I refuse to pay that much for effin TAPE, especially since I need like 15-20 more rolls. I don't care what brand of tape it is. I just need double sided tape for less than $2.50 a roll. I think I am going to go to Target today and see if they have some.

It's starting to get annoying. I think I've spent more money on gas trying to look for cheap tape than I would have if I just sucked it up and paid the extra money to buy the damn expensive tape. Oh well.

Suits.

We are getting our suits through Jim's formal wear. They are Alfresco. We did this a decently long time ago, pre blog, so I never mentioned anything about it. Paul wanted formal tuxes, but I refused. We have an 11 am ceremony and with our luck it will either be raining or hot as balls. I am sure the guys won't appreciate wearing black suits. I convinced Paul that he would like these. I LOOOOVE them. I told him if he wants he can wear man-dles too. I doubt he'll go for it.