DIY-Save the Dates

To everyone who calls these "STD's", please stop, you all confused (and worried) the hell out of me on the Weddingbee boards until someone spelled it out in a post. 

If you have Photoshop or some other software you can easily make a design for these yourself. There are free templates all over the internet that you can alter to your liking. Clip-art sounds cheesy but there is some beautiful (and free!) stuff out there, especially from The Graphics Fairy.

If you don’t have Photoshop, do your best to set things up in Word, save it and any clip art files on a USB and take it to Office Max, or Kinko’s and ask them to lay it out for you in Photoshop. They might try to charge you a ‘layout fee,’ you can usually avoid this by explaining that you already laid it out and just need your Word file transferred into Photoshop. It doesn’t take them more than 5 minutes if they know what they’re doing. If you’ve bought cardstock to print on, make sure you pick card sizes that make the most of your paper. Our save the date cards were 4.25x5.5”, I only had to pay for 13 pages of color printing since we squeaked out 4 cards per page.

Isn't it cute?

You can find nice 110lb cream cardstock at Staples, $15 for 250 sheets. You can sometimes find a Staples coupon and score 10% off. Keeping a stash of coupons in your binder (which you take with you everywhere) is a good thing. This cardstock will make our invitations, return cards, place cards, table numbers, menu cards, etc… You can save money on envelopes by being normal and buying either white or cream from a Staples or Wal-Mart type store. I found a 100 pack that would fit our save the date and response cards for $12.

I found the corner punch at Michael's craft store for $4 with one of those nifty 40% off coupons you can find here.

Anyone else doing stationary from scratch?  How did it turn out?