Wedding on a budget!

So James and I are determined to have an extremely fancy and classy wedding, while spending as little as possible. I've done TONS of online research, read lots of blogs, scoured Pinterest for days, etc to figure out what DIY projects were totally feasible for us to do and what ones we were going to just fork out the cash for. Here's what we've done so far:
*Engagement ring: We bought it at Shane Co because they were the best value for the money and we got a lifetime free warranty on my ring. We'll definitely be going back there for the wedding band and James' ring. My ring is 1/2ct princess cut solitaire

*Wedding dress: After taking Alex to the local library several months ago (April I think) I drove by this adorable little wedding dress boutique downtown that was called Brides for Less. It advertised all wedding dresses in the store at prices under $600. One day James and I walked in to look around at what kind of dresses they had and we fell in LOVE with a particular dress. I tried it on and it fit perfectly. It was extremely flattering to my figure (which is honestly hard to do in a dress lol), it had stunning bead work, spaghetti straps, and a long train. I gawked at myself in the mirror for quite awhile before slowly walking back to the dressing room to take it off. The lady informed us that the shop was closing in one week and all of the dresses were an additional 25% off as was all of the jewelry. What wasn't bought would be sold to another small bridal shop downtown. We went home and all I could think about was the dress. It was perfect. We decided to go ahead and buy it (yes, we bought it before he proposed technically lol) but first we looked around at hundreds of other dresses. None even began to compare to my dress. So we went back in to the shop, two days before they were to close, and I decided that if the dress was still there that it was going to be all mine :) Sure enough, it was hanging from the rack so we snatched it up lol. I tried on lots of tiaras, veils, necklaces, etc and settled on a beautiful tiara and a necklace/earring set. Our total for the dress, tiara, and jewelry was $365!!!! :D I'd post a pic of me in the dress but only a few select people have seen it and I'm determined to keep it that way until I walk down the isle :)

*Garters: I'm going to make my own garters (one to keep and one to toss) so we went to JoAnn's fabrics and looked at lots of ribbon options, and chose a beautiful combo of black, purple, and green ribbon. We found an adorable green button to attach to the middle of the one that I'm keeping and then do an identical garter minus the button as the toss one.

*Save the Dates: I've never been a fan of Save the Date cards. I've found them to be a waste of money and time and they are usually totally cheesy. HOWEVER, since we're getting married on Memorial Day weekend, we opted to make them so that friends and family don't make plans to go out of town. We bought 7 packages of purple and green 5x5 cards at JoAnns for roughly $28 and a pack of white card stock paper for $6. The paper will be cut down to make the cover of the card and the inside info part. These are by far the most stressful part so far lol! They aren't looking as good as I hoped and frankly I'm struggling to not scrap the whole idea.

*Invites: I ordered 90 pocketfolds, 90 envelopes and 90 RSVP envelopes from cardsandpockets.com. We ordered a sample of two different green colors and a purple one (if you haven't figured it out by now our colors are purple and green lol). The green's were NOT the shade that we wanted but thankfully the purple was PERFECT. *sigh of relief* ;)

After we decided to use these, I started slaving away at Photoshop, creating our invites. I got the idea from projectwedding.com (which is the most amazing DIY wedding site EVER) and went from there. This is what we came up with:

The RSVP card is blocking the view of the other inserts but oh well. I can't tell you how much this has saved my sanity! Knowing EXACTLY what I'm going to do when I get the pocketfolds is making this so easy. It was very time consuming figuring out the wording of the inserts because we're renting a lodge for a few days but once we nailed it down we were all set to have them printed. Total cost for pocketfolds, envelopes, and rsvp envelopes: $96.
*Invite and inserts: I was going to print these myself but I realized that at BEST I'd be printing over 130 pages and I didn't want to use that much ink.... so we decided to have Office Max do the printing for us. It's $0.44 per page if we provide our own card stock (which we did. see below for pricing) which isn't all that great, but it's the cheapest in town.
Misc stuff: Michael's crafts is having a 50% off sale on dang near everything in their scrapbook section so we've made more purchases this week than we were planning on, BUT since we've gotten 50% off on EVERY item that we've bought, I think it's ok ;) Temporary pain, long term gain lol. So we got 80 tulle circles for favors for $4.99, green cardstock for the main invite mat (aka the green you see in the pic above, behind the main invite printout) at $0.16/page (we got 44 pages of it), purple ribbon for the invites (aka the purple strip you see above) for $1.99/ea x2, green ribbon (for bows or tying the tulle closed) for $1.99, a big glue dot runner with 100ft of glue dots for $4.99, and adhesive dots for $4.49. For our monograms we had previously purchases white DIY bookmarks from the cardmaking area of Michael's (70 for $5.49) and the green paper for behind them which was $0.39/ea x8 sheets. We got wax sealing stuff, and cute little labels at a previous date for roughly $4 as well. Other prior purchases thanks to 20% off sales at Michaels: sticky velliym for the monograms ($5.50), scripts stamps $8.49 (which we ended up deciding not to use so this was a waste of money :( I'll use them for other projects I guess), and a clear block for the stamps ($5 wasted here too). Michaels crafts is not making very much money off of us and this wedding LOL! :D
*Engagement Journal: This was a random find at Goodwill one day for $4 and it was never written in so we bought it. It is really cute: asks lots of questions about us as individuals, our goals/plans, our personal histories, our parents histories, and then about the wedding, honeymoon, and first year of marriage. It's awesome!

*Candles: We decided to make our own candles to save a little (key word UNFORTUNATELY is "little") money. We bought these pretty glass container things in purple and green at Craft Warehouse for $2.50ea. I forgot how much the wax cost, but due to a Michael's associates misquote on the pricing we got the wax and wicks at 40% off (I think the total was $40-50 for 8 of these candles).

So this one has regular white wax in it but the others have green wax, and the purple containers have purple wax. They are all 3 wick candles and after burning this one for 4 hours we only lost 1/4in of wax. Clearly the patio of the lodge will be lit for a long time lol.
*Engagement Pictures: My best friend did them for us and they are FANTASTIC! Cost: my gas to drive up to the barn that they were done at in White Salmon, WA). http://www.mywedding.com/jpandbrittany/galleries.html (that is a link to a gallery of all of our engagement pictures, while only a select few are shown here).

My son photo-bombed us ;)

*Officiant: We chose not to have a minister marry us.... instead we are paying for a surprise guest to marry us. The license this person will need will cost us roughly $35. Only a few people know who the officiant is, and we want to keep it a secret until the wedding. We're REALLY happy with who it is and super excited that they agreed to do it. We'll get this license after 2013 starts. (Having a minister marry us would have cost $50).
*Location: While at a family reunion for James' family, his cousin told us about a lodge (Anderson Lodge) located in Ariel, WA that they had just visited for another wedding. We checked it out and as soon as we stepped out of the car at the lodge we knew we'd FINALLY found the perfect location. The price was very reasonable, and the lodge is being rented from Sat evening (we're getting married at 6:30pm on Sat) until Monday morning.... meaning our out of town guests don't have to fly in and then fly right back out if they do not wish to. There is more details on this in the invites that we're going to send out.Total cost will be $2900 in the end.

*Wedding website: FREE! WOO! http://www.mywedding.com/jpandbrittany/
Go check it out!
*Guestbook: Idea from here: http://www.marthastewartweddings.com/228540/wedding-guest-book-ideas/@center/272429/diy-weddings#/236520
I bought an 8x8 album (50% off yet again lol) and 3.5x3.5 envelopes and made a smaller version:

So I think that's it so far.... I'm having a blast so far doing all of these DIY projects for the wedding.
-B