Engagement gift bags and napkins

I decided to DYI the gift bags instead of ordering them pre-printed. It saves a ton of money. I ordered paper bags with the roped handles from Paper Mart online. I highly recommend this website. You can find tons of other supplies, such as boxes, tissue paper and ribbons pretty inexpensively.

Here's what my bags look like. I made the sticker myself using photoshop. I put the date of the engagement party at the very bottom. Hard to see in the picture. I ran the label through a Xyron 510 machine (you can get much larger ones, but this one fits a max of 5 inches). The Xyron can do stickers, laminated stickers and magnets. The ones I did are laminated. You'll need like 2 cartridges for 50 4x4 labels.

I also ordered cocktail napkins from thediscountprinter.com. I found the best price for monogrammed napkins on this site. They came in pretty good. I'm satisfied with them. I might also order them for the wedding.

Engagement Invitations

It's official! Invitations went out last week! No going back now because I've spent good money on invitations.

I highly recommend Anna Griffin invitations if you want to DIY. Since it's only for the engagement, I didn't obsess with matching all invites, so I decided to pick my favorite ones. I went with two sets of Anna Griffin, one pink gatefold with a pink ribbon and the other was a green vellum cover with a green ribbon. Excellent paper for ink jet printing. It had to be like a 110#. These cards come at like $3.50-$3.75 a piece, so don't mess up! I used a Canon i80 printer, which only required the paper to go in one direction, so great for heavy card stock. My other choice was from Paper Prince xxox collection, two layer (brown outer layer with ecru inlay) and a vellum cover and ivory bow. Super cute. Paper also excellent. A little more cost effective at about 2 bucks a piece.

To the left is the 'green vellum' invite and to the right is the 'pink gatefold' invite.

Here's the XXOX brown and ecru invite with the vellum wrap and bow.

I do not recommend Crane's printable invitations (don't get me wrong, I absolutely love Crane's).

I got these invitations for non-family and other friends as an alternative to the "expensive" invites. While the weight is great and paper is very pretty, ink does not respond well to the paper. It ends up being kinda of light. It does look cool because of the silvery finish, but all in all, I would get these invites either laser printed or thermo'ed.