Weddingbee Blog

Thump, thump went my very happy heart when we finally got our save the dates out the door (only a month after we said we would)! It was one of those moments where you felt like your wedding was REAL! We had them printed at Vistaprint, unlike our invitations, for two reasons. First, they were super duper inexpensive. Second, two of our friends had used Vistaprint and their invites turned out just fine! It always helps when you’ve seen the product first hand before getting it yourself. Time for some eye candy!

Our friends Jesse and Deanna, both illustrators, designed these themselves! We had wanted to do drawings of each other on our invites, but they beat us to it! Aren’t they fantastic?

Designing our own invitation suite was more stressful than either of us could have imagined, especially since we both have art backgrounds. We went through so many design ideas that it got to the point where we were desperate to bust out some STDs before it was too late. We decided what we really needed was to be set on one element that we could carry over to our invitations, colors, and fonts. This way our STDs could somewhat reflect our invites and the rest of the suite could have more time to marinate in our thoughts.

So after seven weeks of waiting, our save the dates were home! We decided to go with the ever popular postcard style featuring a picture of each of us from our engagement day on the front.

On the reverse the design was kept simple. We stuck calendar stickers on them that we had printed from moo that included our date and snippet of our invitation motif using a glue stick.

The corners were rounded using a Fisker’s 1/4″ rounder. They were simple, personal and our guests loved them! Some people had no idea the sticker was meant for their calendar, but they still loved having it! Of course, at the last minute, my Sunbeamy self thought it would be oh so cute to make envelope liners. That took forever, and was quite the gluey mess! Needless to say I’ll be skipping that detail for our invites!

I will say that if you print with Vistaprint, or any other online printer, when you up load your design, make sure it fills up the entire space, way beyond the bleed line. When we ordered I assumed it had to go just beyond the bleed/cutting line and found myself trimming off little white edges here where the cutting more off than expected. The reason we didn’t also print our invitations here is that the card stock is a little flimsy, so we spent a little more and got those printed elsewhere. Bottom line: Our STDs were out the door and we had bought more time designing the rest of our invitations.

*Short-lived moment of relief*

Were you brave enough to design your own invitation suite? Did you have trouble pulling all the pieces together or were you a whiz with the designing process?