Giveaways!

Not long after Cary and I got engaged I started searching for inspiration for the wedding. I quickly poured over magazines, websites, blogs, and books. However, blogs are my favorite...obviously I liked them so much that we started our own! Well, along with blogs comes the occasional give away. Often, the blog owner will giveaway a sponsored product or service to one of their readers. All the reader has to do is visit the product's company site and then comment on the blog post with their name and contact email. It's that simple, and it is a win-win situation. The company gets free publicity and lots of internet traffic while the blog's readers get a great prize.
Anyway, I quickly caught on to these giveaways and entered several. Although, I must caution you to only enter reputable ones...there's a lot of sketchy things on the internet, so be careful.
All in all I've won several things for the wedding and it has allowed us to keep costs down a bit. The first prize I won (and definitely the best) was our engagement session with our photographer along with the save the dates and a portrait. I also won our favor boxes for the wedding as well as favor boxes for the rehearsal dinner (and for a while there I thought I was destined to win cute little boxes!). The latter came from Origami Boxes, a cute website that sales all sizes of origami boxes in all sorts of papers. I was very impressed with their customer service and would recommend them to anyone.

origamiboxes.org

Most recently I won a clay flower cake topper. Sounds weird, I know, but visit the artist's site and you will quickly see these things are amazing! The company is called DK Designs, and it is based in Hawaii.

dkdesignshawaii.com

Mine is different than any of those because the artist allowed me to customize it a little. I would definitely recommend one as a keepsake!