Sustainable Personal Finance

Sustainable Wedding: Invitations and Guest Book

We knew as soon as we started planning our wedding that we would not be sending out invitations by mail, too much paper and costly given the rise in stamp prices and the mark up on everything “wedding”.  So we decided on sending e-vites.  My parents, who have now been married 35 years, had an image of the two of them on bicycles for their wedding invitation: their courtship was mostly on bicycles. As each of us kids was born, an image of us was added to that invitation and sent out to friends and family. I wanted to use this idea as well. During a visit to my now father in laws house, we did a photo shoot of SPF and myself. These pictures were then used by my brother as a base to draw our invitation: the two of us walking hand in hand into the sun set, with the added outline of the university through which we met and of the music festival where Sustainable PF proposed to me.  In the e-vite,  below the image described above,  we added other elements such as the standard wedding information, when, where, etc. What was really neat about this invitation was that my brother connected it ito a Google documents spreadsheet so that whenever guests RSVP’d, their response would automatically populate a spreadsheet that Sustainable PF and I had access to.  We did have some family like our grandparents who do not use the Internet for the most part and we knew they would appreciate a traditional invitation. So we used the same invitation but the paper we used was made from recycled textile materials, which my brother found in Montreal, Quebec.

The image we used for the invitation also got used for our “Guest Book”. We did not want to use the traditional guest book which guests would sign and we would put on a shelf in our house and never look at again. So instead, my brother printed out a large version of our invitation image and we laid it out on a table in the reception hall and asked guests to sign it. Our idea is that once we have finished our house renovations, we will mount that “guest book” on a wall somewhere and our family and friends good wishes and advice can be contemplated anytime.

So all in all our invitations cost us maybe a couple of dollars to send invitations to older relatives and the cost of stamps. The e-vite, the “guest book” and all the work they involved was my brothers wedding gift to us.  We also saved numerous trees by sending out sustainable wedding invitations electronically and by not wasting many pages of note paper in a guest book.

photo credit: FunnyBiz