Weddingbee Blog

I’m a tease, guilty as charged. I left everyone hanging with the design of our Save the Dates. We’ve confirmed their delivery. It’s time to fill you in on the rest. When I last left you Mr P had given me this sketch as inspiration.

Here is a little peek:

Weddingbee reader laur xyz was spot on in interpreting Mr Pretzel’s design. She said it looked like a sunburst with the Space Needle in front. That is exactly what he was envisioning. He admits to being inspired by the Pike Place Brewery logo which features a black and red sunburst. Ironically a sunburst was one design element I had also thought about incorporating. I had already downloaded a free sunburst brush package for Photoshop from Brush King.

Source

I started to look for images of the Space Needle that I could clean up and make a solid graphic out of. This was a little more difficult. I didn’t want a photograph, I wanted something more clip-arty or black and white line drawing like—however with a high resolution to avoid a pixilated look. I searched high and low and even tried my hand at converting my photos to graphics. No luck. Then I broadened my interpretation of his drawing and replaced the Space Needle with a black and white graphic of Seattle from the water. It’s got the Needle, Mount Rainier, and a Ferry all in one picture- how Seattle is that?!

Source

For typefaces on the front we used Segoe UI (standard font) and CastIron from dafont.com. On the back I wanted to incorporate text as a graphic. I used a giant ampersand in Charlemagne Std to tie together our names and our two receptions. Here is our digital mock up.

Over two weekends we mixed up our Gocco inks and pressed, pressed, pressed out 150 save the dates. We have a PG10 Super Gocco which allows for easy registration (aligning your printing surface up just right to do multi-color/layer printing) so we broke our design into four separate screens. I estimate that means I pressed 600+ times.

Front

Back

We rounded the corners of the invites with a corner punch. 600 punches later we slid them into our 100% recycled craft envelopes from EnvelopeMall. The envelopes might look hand written, but they were actually printed on my laser printer using the free font “Pea Amy Sue” from Fonts for Peas.

Our guests’ reactions to the save the dates have been very positive. Most folks didn’t realize that we handmade them, which I guess is a compliment. Most of all, Mr Pretzel and I love this project because it helped us learn how to work together creatively and it represents a true collaboration.

What elements of your wedding have you and your mister collaborated on?