Wedding Blog

Since it appears that save-the-dates have started rolling in, I think I’m safe to post pictures of them. I was very happy with the way they turned out—making the STDs myself was a project I had been dreading every since I purchased my Gocco. But, I turned out not needing it for this project. (Don’t worry, Gocco fans—I have plans for it. Oh, do I have plans.)

The Dude and I had a friend design our STDs for us. He not a graphic designer, just an all-around creative guy. I was really glad to hand this project over to someone else—I honestly don’t think I could’ve come up with anything as cool on my own.

The guest bedroom during our night of frenzied printing

After we picked one of his designs, on a whim I decided to try printing it on my Canon Pixma printer. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting much—but the colors came out nicely, and it looked better than I could’ve imagined. Of course, the ink on that bad boy costs more than the printer’s worth, but I only had to replace the cartridges once.

I used oatmeal-colored recycled cardstock from Paper-Papers to print the STDs on. It was only 80 lb. weight. I had made the paper purchase before I knew there were different weights of cardstock, so it was a bit flimsier than would’ve been ideal. Especially considering we sent them out as postcards. But in the end, I think most of them got to their destinations safe and sound.

Here’s a (sorta blurry) picture of the front. All the tan-looking parts were places that were white in the original design. I like how you can see the oatmeal cardstock peeking through.

The “design” on the back came from a quick Google image search. I literally typed in “post card back”, and this was one of the first things that came up. The Dude reformatted it to fit the size of our postcards, and voila! On the right-hand side, I wrote out the addresses using a Sharpie fine-tip pen. I picked out a sloppy-cursive style I liked on dafont (luckily it was close to my natural half print/half cursive handwriting), and wrote out each address in Word. I then did my best to copy the addresses in this font. (It’s called Having Writ, if anyone wants to know.) Finally, I wrote a personalized message to each recipient on the left-hand side of the card.

This picture came out blurry, too (and I edited out some identifying information). But hopefully you get the idea.

Now, for the stamps. I love the rock ’n’ roll icon stamps! Where did I get them, you ask? I read a great tip for finding vintage stamps from Miss Cowboy Boot. She suggested going to this eBay store called Sea Jay Stamp and Coin. This store has a ton of vintage stamps—pretty much anything you could ever dream up. But they’re pricey. So whenever you see a particular set of stamps you like, write down the Scott catalog number, and do a search for it on eBay. Typically, you can find other sellers listing your stamp for cheaper. I tried this trick out and found these great stamps from 1997—they vaguely matched our music-poster-inspired save the dates. More importantly, in 1997 stamps cost 29 cents—not too far from what post card stamps cost now (28 cents)! Unfortunately, we had all the STDs printed before I received the stamps, so the stamps didn’t quite fit in their corner. I had to turn them sideways. Still, I think they look cool.

I bought vintage stamps for our invitations as well, but you guys’ll have to wait to see those!