Weddingbee Blog

Sometimes I’m reminded that most people don’t spend their time immersed in the world of Weddingbee, Style Me Pretty, and other various wedding blogs like I do. That said, when I thought of what to title my post, I immediately thought of the tagline “Giving our guests STDs”, as a sort of tongue in cheek wedding reference, but then thought better of it — what kind of Google searches would land people here?

Some couples who are marrying abroad/having a destination wedding do this, as there are complicated travel arrangements that need to be made in advance. Other couples send them so they can get an early read on who may or may not be coming (”Oh, we just received your save the date… unfortunately we’ll be in Iceland”). We’re sending them because our wedding isn’t a typical Saturday evening wedding, and will require most people to take off of work. We wanted to give people a head’s up. Oh, and we’ve changed our wedding date and location numerous times, so we thought it might be a helpful reminder for people.

When perusing wedding blogs for the last, oh… 12 months, I kept image files of a lot of the STDs that I really like.

I considered doing something really involved and unique, and then I realized that, for me, the words “involved” and “unique” really mean “tons of time”. Time is at a premium right now … so that went out the window. Had I done the super-involved project, though, I would have definitely done a STD a la Martha Stewart.

Image: Martha Stewart Weddings

I then considered having something printed by one of my favorite wedding stationers, Wedding Paper Divas. They have tons of beautiful STDs, but unfortunately our budget for this little project was pretty close to the $0.00 mark, so they were out. Had we gone with them, however, I would have chosen this one, hands down.

Image: Wedding Paper Divas

So, I let the project sit for a while. I mulled it over. And then one day I got an email from VistaPrint, an online printing company. They were offering 100 color postcards for the magic number of FREE. Well, they weren’t totally free; if we wanted to upload our own image, there was a tiny charge. And another tiny charge for printing. But, still — they were ridiculously cheap, and definitely within our budget.

So, I set to work using one of the engagement pictures that my sister B had taken of us last fall. Um, I guess you could say that I kind of like this picture. Maybe this is telling me that I should get the file and have it printed/framed for our house? I think that might be in order.

Anyway, It’s a little different, and doesn’t show our faces, which I liked. That might sound weird, but something about random postal workers being able to see our faces kind of skeeved me out (we are using postcards, after all). So, I did some (rudimentary) graphic editing, and found myself with our STD.

Image quality is a little low, this I know, as it is just a digital preview file.
Oh, and you have no idea how much it pains me to have to put black boxes over our info. Rest assured, it all matches.

Since we didn’t need them ASAP, I chose their “slow” shipping option, and still had them within 2 weeks of my order date. The quality is really great — much better than I expected. So, now the next task will be finalizing the guest list, and then gathering everyone’s complete/accurate addresses, a task in and of itself. Good thing I didn’t choose the “involved and unique” STDs!

How did you choose your STDs? Did you make them completely from scratch, or did you have a little help, like I did?