A Little Golden Age: DIY Save the Dates

Eric and I didn’t even consider having our save the dates or invitations made for us. We figured it would be too expensive, but mostly we are crafty people and like spending the time together. It was fun stamping the front of our save the dates, but I have to admit I did research how much it would cost to get our invitations done after attempting the back printing ourselves (which confirmed that it’s much too expensive for us. The average price for invites we liked on Etsy was $300 for 25, plus maps and rsvp cards are extra). It was extremely frustrating as our printer kept smudging ink and shifting text off center. Eric is much calmer than I am when it comes to computers so I left him to do that (*cough* he asked me to leave and go stamp, ha). He did figure it out, but we did waste some envelopes and paper in the process. We are very lucky, because we live down the street from one of the best paper stores in the city and had such a fun time picking paper (yes picking paper is AMAZING! So many colours and textures... who knew it could be so fun!). The seed paper won us over because of how beautiful it is and because how cool it is to plant a save the date and have a fun, living reminder of our love! We were a bit adventurous as the staff told us no one had attempted putting the paper through a printer before. They did say not to use a laser printer or you would cook the seeds, and that a regular printer might just get clogged with seeds. We decided to risk our printer anyway and are very glad we did! It didn’t clog our printer at all and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the paper that was causing our printer to smudge (we have an awful printer that only sometimes works, we we’re planning on using my dad’s laser, but figured cooked seed paper was a little pointless). Below is a breakdown of how much it cost us to make 27 save the dates. Remember we did buy a couple extra envelopes and sheets of paper, plus our printer needed ink so we had to buy a whole new cartridge which will get us through many more printing jobs.