Weddingbee bios

Phil and I have been together for 10 years. We got engaged this past Christmas Eve (2012) in front of the Christmas tree in our living room. Our anniversary is on December 29th, so he got the question in right before the 10 year mark!

We thought it would be fitting to take a picture for our engagement announcement in front of our beautiful Christmas tree before taking it down, so we set up a mini photo shoot!

So with the help of my new DSLR, a tripod, some diy lighting and about 100 takes (becasue the look on his face alternated between goofy smile and blue steel - neither of which I thought were appropriate for the engagement announcement) we got one photo that we thought would be perfect for the announcement!

We also did a number of shots to get the ring in... this is the one I liked best, with us holding hands.

They're not professional quality, but we were very happy with them!

After the photo shoot, I set out to make the engagement announcement. My day job is web/graphic design, so I was able to design the announcement myself in Photoshop using some digital scrapbooking content I have.

I got the 5x7 announcements, 5x7s and 4x6s of the engagement photo for family and for us to keep, along with an 8x10 of the engagement photo my mom printed at Costco. This saved a LOT of money. I ended up printing 80 announcements, and with the additional prints and a box of 50 envelopes from Staples, I paid under $45 for everything.

So that was my experience with the engagement photos. We likely will end up doing something else this summer with a friend's husband who is a professional photographer, but this was good enough for what we wanted, and we are very happy with how it turned out.

Just wanted to share what we did in case it might help any other bees with their DIY announcements!

Ashley