It turns out that, as with so many things in life, there are two basic approaches to wedding planning: DIY (do it yourself) and PSE (pay someone else). Like lots of brides (especially those who frequent Weddingbee, which I've found to be the single most valuable wedding planning website in the whole world), I'm engaging in some of each. As I mentioned a few months ago, we did hire professional coordinators to make sure we're not forgetting anything and to keep everything perfectly organized leading up to and on the day of the wedding. But there are things I want to do myself or with my girlfriends, too. Here's a basic rundown of some of the major components of our celebration and how we decided between DIY and PSE:

We ordered our save-the-dates from MagnetStreet.com.

Save-the-dates: PSE (with DIY elements)

Because this is a destination wedding for about half our guests, we sent save-the-date cards to out-of-towners so they could start making travel arrangements. I've seen a lot of STD ideas on wedding blogs (you can go for the basic postcard, a mini preview of your invitation, or send pens, pencils, balloons, puzzles, calendars...), but we thought magnets seemed practical, handy, and minimally labor-intensive. Our wedding coordinators suggested MagnetStreet, and after doing some comparison shopping, we decided they had the best selection and price for our needs. We picked a customizable template, selected our own colors and laid it out using our own photos and font choices. We addressed and mailed them ourselves.

I will say it was hard to get motivated on this particular project; even though we didn't make them ourselves, it was a ton of work not just stuffing and hand-addressing envelopes and stamping them with the return address stamp we bought from an Etsy vendor, but actually finalizing the guest list and collecting addresses. The STDs sat in a box in our living room from October until we finally got them out the door in January. And honestly, a couple of people still don't have them.

Invitations: DIY

I probably shouldn't say this out loud since I work at an online-only news site... but I love paper. I looooove paper. And producing my own invitations means I get to invest in some new equipment for playing with paper and we end up with totally unique invitations. My matron of honor is right -- it's going to be a ton of work, particularly with our guest list. But I have to say I'm much more excited about the idea of spending hours with my Cricut than I am about the idea of trying to find something that really represents us among Anchorage's limited options for print or watching designs swim past on the Internet.

If you're going this route, take notice: Papercrafting "finishing touches" are 40 percent off at our local Jo-Ann stores this week. That includes things like stickers, stamps, eyelets, pens, embossing powder... I stocked up in anticipation of the many, many do-overs I'm sure I'll need to do.