Wedding Blog
Time to get crafty! Here’s the Patented Potato Process for easy-as-peasy-pie Save the Dates.
Step 1: Brainstorm. This part was the hardest. There is so much inspiration out there! We love Save the Date magnets. We have four or five on our fridge right now, including friends who got married three years ago and whose date, one might assume, no longer needs saving. But their smiling faces hold up our ‘za menus, and we like them there.
But postcards are also nice. Postage is cheaper… and they can easily be stuck to the fridge via another couple’s Save the Date magnet. We decided on postcards.
Not just any postcards! Our venue sells beautiful postcards with four or five different black and white photos of what The Towers looked like in its heyday, in the 1900s. We got a few for free from the coordinator and loved how they looked: vintage, featuring the charm of the Gilded Age, elegant, simple.
Step 2: Design a mock-up. From Martha Stewart.com I downloaded an image of an old-fashioned stamp. From dafont.com, I downloaded the font “Summertime” for its curliqued turn-of-the-century charm. Please believe me when I say I was immensely and unjustly proud of how crafty this made me feel. I was like, “oooh, lookame!! Craftin’ me up a wedding!!” In all actuality, all I know how to do is work the Google on the Internet machine. Potato Head and I played with spacing and margins and ended up with a Word doc:
Step 3: Scrap the whole darn thing. Yup. We were excited about our Save the Dates for about a day. Then a conversation much like the one below occurred:
One Potato: “Ugh, this seems like a lot of work, with the printing and the buying-of-stamps. And all our wedding guests live in either Boston or Rhode Island. And all those people know the date anyway. Couldn’t we put all this info on a free wedding website and call it a day?”
Two Potato: “Yes. Let’s order a pizza. Isn’t there a coupon on the fridge behind your cousin’s Save the Date magnet?”
Our Save the Dates-That-Could-But-Weren’t now have a comfy home in wee black frames behind our bar. We emailed our friends and family with hotel accommodation info and spent the money we would’ve spent on postage on beer and take-out. I mean, we put it in savings. And by savings, I mean beer and take-out.
With so many Save the Date options out there, how did you decide what to do? Or did you scrap the idea altogether?
|
Share this post: The Save-the-Dates That Weren’t
I just kinda threw one together in MS Word & sent it in an e-mail, or printed it out for my grandparents. I’m hoping to just put the picture on a postcard thru VistaPrint & send it out to family again.
I wish we would have scraped the idea. Oh well. We sent the magnets.
hahaha… i love that you scrapped the idea and got pizza & beers instead! that’s so awesome!
Now that we’re at the “gathering correct addresses” stage of the STD game, I wish we would have scrapped the idea and gotten pizza and beer. 
“And by savings, I mean beer and take-out.” Utterly awesome.
you guys are too funny. I designed a save the date with an engagement picture, but still emailed them out. So much easier and cheaper!
you are my kind of girl! too funny…beer and take out!
our save the dates were easy, practically free and only took a couple of hours from start to finish…but I wanted people traveling from far away to have enough notice to make accomodations, etc.
Too funny! We ordered cards on a nice recycled stock that we still haven’t sent out. The thought of postage is just making my head spin as it is.
I wish I would DIY more. I’d probably scrap projects and go the simpler/less expensive route, too. Instead I buy handmade and then can’t undo the damage once I’m over a component.
Those would’ve been super-cute but I am all about the saving of money, so in the end, it’s all good…On a side note, I too feel similiarly Martha Stewart-esque when I do something stupidly crafty like downloading a font from dafont…
We used something like your postcard idea. We bought a bunch of vintage-y looking “Greetings from Massachusetts” postcards, typed up what we wanted to say on them (date and our website info), and then took the stack of postcards and the Word file to a local printer, who was able to print the info directly onto the postcards themselves. We bought and had 250 cards printed all for about $105. We’re pretty pleased with ourselves and have gotten lots of compliments from our geographically far-flung family members on the cute idea.
Stamps are really expensive. I didn’t factor them into my save the date plan. Opps. So instead we made pizza and bought beer and spent the rest on the save the dates.
P.Chips, excellent post as always! I did save the date emails, and made personal phone calls to older relatives who have no clue (and don’t want to) about the internet revolution. Cheers to pizza and beer!
Definitely a waste of postage! For me it would be at least, since everyone who’s coming already knows the date. I might design a cute email save-the-date, but that’s as far as it goes.
I’m nervous about the postage on ours. My fiance really wanted magnets, but our room blocks end before we send out the invites, so we have to get all the room block information in with our save the dates, so we are thinking of magnets and getting paper from papersource to print the additional information.
We wish it was an expense we could skip, I’m jealous of your alternative! All of our guests are from out of state, and some are flying in, so we need to get them info. and my family isn’t great with the computer so the website wasn’t really a good idea for us.
We just didn’t bother with the added expense. I’m sure we took the money a treated ourselves to sushi a few extra times, lol.
haha, loves it P to the C. We have almost all out of towners so went with the save the dates….we’ve yet to send out…which means we should have just emailed, oh well.
Lol…love your posts as always. FI & I often get through the whole brainstorm & mock up stage of things & then change our minds about all the effort.
However, our StDs were NOT one of those abandoned projects…we LOVED making them. FI is in the film industry & we’re both big movie buffs, so we decided to make DVD trailer StDs - one trailer each for both of our wedding dates! FI created & cut the trailers, we designed & home-printed our DVD labels, embossed gold seals for the center of our cases & used more seals on the envelopes. About $2 each (including postage) for 30 parties…we got an overwhelmingly enthusiastic response from our guests (20% already RSVPed “yes” on our website), so I’d say, for us, total worth the effort!
i love this story. hehe. especially the “craftin me up a wedding!” i think i might have to use that someday.
as much much much as i’d love another excuse to buy paper and think about thickness color design fonts… and then envelopes, shapes, postage, and more…. in this day and age i feel like save the dates (at least for me) would be only an excuse to use more paper and spend more money. both of which id rather not do.
That’s awesome - I love that you put your money into savings … haha. I’m pretty sure we’re not having save the dates … or maybe only sending them to a few choice people (like the ones that do live far away) but I know I don’t want to do magnets … and I’m feeling like straying from postcards, too. Haha. The world may never know …
I’m so glad to hear you scrapped them. Not sure when they became mandatory for some people, but really, you only need them if your wedding is a destination or if there would be a specific need to get out the information so people had time to react to it.
Lol - I love this post - you are too funny!! We decided on save-the-dates, mainly because I wanted to justify purchasing a Gocco.
Love this post! I, too, feel very crafty when I find something that makes me look crafty on the internet. And we also sometimes spend our wedding money on beer, but we usually buy Po-boys, not pizza
as always, love your posts…and if i haven’t mentioned it before, i love the fact that you refer to your FI as Potato Head. HAHA!!
It is the darn stamps that becomes so costly. My fiance’s family is all from the UK so we felt it important to send out Save the Dates. We didn’t send to everyone but we designed them ourselves based on our Scrabble theme and I’m rather thrilled with how they came out.
haha! well, scrap the stamps then!
i designed one in photo shop with a picture of us and some photoshop brushes, printed them on photo paper and stuck on card stock. then handed them out at a party 
Yeah, I agree STDs are unnecessary a lot of the time. I’m sure yours woulda been cute, though!
We found a company to do our postcards for about 17 cents each. It seemed reasonable inexpensive. I don’t postage will be too much. But Miss French Fries brings up a good point: getting the addresses might not be so fun. On the bright side, I will have the addresses ready for the invites.
Your posts are always so, so awesome and fun! Pizza indeed. I’m weirdly obsessing about STD’s and can’t choose a design to save my life!
Pretty postcards! I did sort of the same thing, but I bought 5 vintage postcards of our venue off ebay and then scanned in the one I liked best for our Save-The-Dates. I even used the same Martha Stewart graphic for the back!
http://bellsandbouquets.blogspot.com/2009/07/save-date-postcard-extended-dance-remix.html
After we’re married, I definitely plan on putting the original postcards on the wall like you did!
| Visit our sister sites | Project Wedding Wedding Songs |
eHarmony Advice Dating Advice |
JustMommies Pregnancy Calendar |
Fertile Thoughts Infertility Support |
Ms. Potato Chips, Boston/Narragansett RI
Age and Occupation: 29, PhD Student
Fiance's Age and Occupation: 30, Personal Trainer/Business Owner/Physical Therapy Assistant
Engagement Date: January 1, 2009
Wedding Date: June 2010
Venue: The Narragansett Towers
About Me: A semi-professional bookworm, if I could be a literary character I’d be a cross between Jo March and Jane Eyre, only better accessorized and much lazier. My hobbies include sleeping in, seasonal brews, running, Trader Joe’s, and watching Unwrapped and Good Eats with Mr. Potato Chips. I harbor an irrational fear of tulle, crafts, things that are fussy, and overuse of the phrase "Your Special Day". After a year or seven together, down the aisle we go, slouching toward adulthood and planning a Rhodie party with equal parts whimsy, cheer, and pizza.
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
| 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |
| 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 |
| 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 |
| 29 | 30 |
Latest Gallery Pics