Tangled Thoughts

This was probably one of our better ideas this year.

And so far, its turned out to be a rather…Picture Perfect idea…no pun intended!

I feel almost obligated to pass on this information, having spent a good day talking, researching, and weighing out the options for Amanda & Davids wedding announcement picture, trying to score the best deal, for quality photos.

For Christmas cards:

We went with Snapfish. I almost went with Shutterfly – they had a great “Black Friday” deal, but I got scared, and the timer was more than I could handle 🙂

I will say, I was skeptical at best, and worried.  I have never had good luck getting pictures printed (lets not get into the Kiosk Machine Troubles of ‘08).  What if I ordered them, and they were pixilated?  What if there was a mistake and someone had a dirty spot right under their nose?  What if we didn’t like it?  There was no way to “Proof” before ordering, and after a late night freak out on my part, we made the plunge.  We ended up with 120 (with envelopes) greeting cards, 5x 7 for $70.

They arrived today and to say we were pleased would be an understatement!  The quality couldn’t be better!!  The only problem is now we feel obligated to address all 120 of the envelopes.

Score!!

For the wedding invitations – we decided our best bet would be to go through Walmart.com – mainly because we were going to be placing a mass order and didn’t want to have to pay for something that wasn’t what we wanted.  We decided to order one picture, and pick it up later that night.  After verifying that was infact, what we wanted, and that the quality was par we placed our order.  We went about things a little differently, instead of placing one mass order for all 125 pictures, we split the order into 3, keeping the amount under 425 so we didn’t have to pay with a credit card.

And it worked!!

We were impressed!

For gifts – were taking a much lighter approach.  We decided to get some prints made at Walmart and send them to our grandpa and uncle, along with some baked goods.  Both of whom, spend the holidays alone.

We got together a group of pictures we liked, uploaded and sent them off.  We were shocked when we picked the order up and discovered that the price was $35!!  The original order had said it would be $15 for 81 photos.  After looking the photo lady said that they had charged us for “Greeting cards” instead of regular photos.

For $20 (15 for pictures, 5 for an album) we were able to put together a cute collection of pictures for our grandpa.

I didnt get pictures of this, and we mailed it off today, but the quality of the pictures were great.

Tips – We found it to be cheaper to order pictures off of Walmart.com vs. going in and printing them off the machines.  It was faster, and much more stress free!!

Wallet sizes – this is confusing!  After talking and researching I finally was able to figure out that wallet sized photos are put on a 4×6 photo – two to a page.  If you specify that you do NOT want them cut, it was ½ price – here atleast!

Uploading – Upload pictures as their original size, and do the cropping on the photo site.  We found this to save from the pictures getting all pixilated – atleast that’s what we THINK happened.  We usually crop the picture to how we want, and upload, and get poor quality.  But this year was a pleasant surprise!

Use the coupons – I am always skeptical about coupons, especially online, the ones that say “Use this and get free shipping at check out” but guess what?  They really work!  We scored free shipping!!

And last but not least – dont stress!  Remember the real reason of Christmas and dont get caught up in everything if it stresses you out.

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The distortion in any of the pictures is thanks to my camera!

These opinions were based only on and from our experience.