Weddingbee Blog

In early January we placed the order for our personally designed Save the Date magnets. Approximately 2 weeks later they arrived in the mail and I couldn’t have been more excited! I felt like a kid at Christmas opening her first present and tore that box open before I got down the driveway! I was completely and utterly thrilled to finally see them in their printed glory.

Well… that’s a lie. A huge part of me was disappointed.

Though I knew there would be a white border surrounding the image I couldn’t shake the feeling that the white border cheapened the look of them. That said, I didn’t hate them, I just felt that they could and they would look better. This is when I decided to take on the tedious task of trimming each and every one of these by hand, but before I could start I needed to figure out which way they would look best.

I present to you my 4 trim prototype options:

Can you guess which option we liked best?

The winner by a landslide was:

Picking this trim option meant I would have a lot of work ahead of me, but it also meant I would get to use my new Martha Stewart Cutting Mat (which I scored for only $2 @ Michaels, apparently it was “damaged”). So I cracked open a bottle of wine and set up my workspace in the living room while Mr. Locket lounged on the couch and watched The Notebook (I know, he’s a softy ). Initially, he had planned to help round corners, but being the control freak that I am I relinquished his duties after he rounded only a few.

I also thought about trimming these babies by hand with an X-Acto knife, but quickly changed my mind when I realized the magnets were thin enough to be cut with my Fiskars paper trimmer.

I trimmed off all the sides and followed it by rounding the corners with my handy-dandy rounded corner punch.

As time went by I began to see progress and my pile of untrimmed magnets turned into piles of trimmed and rounded magnets.

It took forever and after about 4 hours of trimming 400 sides and rounding 400 corners I was finished!!! Cue crazy picture of me:

Even though the magnets were trimmed and rounded I still had another day of work ahead of me. I needed to figure out how I would present these little cuties. I won’t post on that project today, but I will give you a sneak peek of my semi-finished product:

To tie things up here is a walk through of what this project entailed:

• Create prototypes of trim options
• Pick the best option
• Trim off white spaces (4 sides/magnet=400 sides total)
• Round corners with corner punch (4 corners/magnet=400 total)
• Go mad with the redundancy of the task at hand
• Cheer for joy and pass out once said task is complete

And here are things I would have changed:

• I would have made sure to have a fresh blade in my cutter (it would have made cutting smoother and would have led to less swipes over the magnet to cut it)
• I would have also purchased a new corner punch (the one I had was beginning to get dull and would occasionally jam leading to the occasional rough corner)

Have you found a project that drove you mad? Did you manage to get through it gracefully and with success? What do you think? Was this project worth the hard work? I think so!! I am very happy with the result and even though it’s not 100% perfect I highly doubt our guests will notice a slightly rough corner here or there.