Wedding Blog

Save the dates, that is! I’m still not totally accustomed to this new use for the acronym STD. I think high school heath class has drilled the less-desirable version into our heads! But writing STD is so much easier than spelling out three whole words!

Anyway, about those STDs—I had always intended on being thrifty and making our own. I thought it would be a great way to save some money and do something creative at the same time. I scoured the internet for ideas, and these were my three favorite choices:

I love photo booths, so I had planned on using this photo strip design ever since we were first engaged (way back in 2006!). It’s cute and unexpected (or at least it was in 2006… everyone has probably seen one of these by now), and would be really easy to make!

This one comes from Martha Stewart Weddings. It’s a postcard with a tiny envelope attached. I would have had to adopt a cute, funky writing style like the one shown in the picture. Also, on the backside of the postcard, we would have printed one of our engagement pictures.

This STD is SO cute. The couple met at a coffee shop, so they went back to that shop and had a couple of cappuccinos made with heart-shaped foam. They photographed them with the newspaper and book on the table and later Photoshopped the details of the wedding on to the book. But my favorite part is the newspaper. They Photoshopped a picture of them AND one of their cat on to the newspaper! It is so sweet and personal! I am dying for one of my friends to copy this idea so I can live vicariously through them and this awesome STD.

Now, on to the STD that we actually picked! Like I mentioned before, we had lots of fun ideas for STDs. And we had lots of time to come up with them too, having a two-year engagement! The only problem was that all three of those ideas involved engagement pictures. I haven’t talked about our photographer drama yet (we’ll save that for another day), but to make a long story short, our wedding was less than 6 months away and we didn’t have any engagement pictures! We needed to get STDs out fast, and didn’t have time to do a photo shoot or hand make our own STDs. That’s when I found Laura Hooper. Laura is a super-talented calligrapher who designs wedding invitations and. more importantly for us, custom maps! I fell in love with her hand-drawn maps of wedding locations. I knew that having one on our STD would provide the perfect introduction to Grand Cayman for our guests. Laura’s maps aren’t cheap, but they are worth every penny. She included our wedding venue, hotels, and other Grand Cayman landmarks. I loved the map so much that I ordered a large-sized version for us to frame and hang up in our house.

I enjoyed working with Laura so much that I am having her design our invitations as well! Her work is out of our initial invitation budget, but I am so in love with her designs, I’d rather cut corners somewhere else.

What have you splurged on that you didn’t originally plan to?