this is officially my first “frugal living” post! i wrote an introduction here explaining why its so fun for me to save money as well as how it benefits me and my husband!
i was always trying to save money during my 13.5 months of wedding planning. here is one big way i saved-we made our own wedding programs. we also did part of our invitations the same way, but as these were entirely hand-crafted, i thought this was a better example.
we used:
- about 300 sheets of printing paper-this paper was thicker then regular multi-purpose or copy paper, making it a little more durable during the process
- a cheap dark tea (in bags)
- ink. we had to replace my friend leah’s printer cartridges only once
- elbow grease-it took a lot of work and i had brown hands for about a week, but it was totally worth it
this is about the color we were looking for, we were constantly boiling fresh batches

we soaked each sheet for about a minute
oh yeah, note the design already printed on the paper.
we pre-printed a pretty design on the paper, and it faded as it got wet and baked-
it had a really cool effect!

then we ironed for a flatter sheet of paper.
(this was mostly so we could run the sheets through the printer)