Weddingbee Blog

Here are my save the dates that I’m so very proud of. I hope you like them as much as I love (and I mean LOVE) them.

Ok, so here’s how we (and by we, I really mean me) made them. I scoured high and low online to find the perfect inspiration. I knew I wanted to do a simple postcard that people could easily hang on their fridge to remember the date. My Mama Plaid uses VistaPrint for her at-home business quite frequently, so I knew I wanted to use them. They’ve got great prices that you just can’t beat.

I wanted to incorporate both mine and my mister’s personalities in the STD and immediately thought video games/xBox360. (I think Mr. Plaid has turned me in to a total geek…oh well.) Anyway, if you know anything about xBox, when you make a profile you get to create a cute little avatar to look like you. You can chose different outfits and everything! Fun! (I’m sure that’s what all the boys are thinking, too.)

So I signed on to each of our profiles and changed our outfits to more formal attire, him in a suit and me in a red dress (there are no wedding dresses available on the xBox—rude!) So then I had to hunt down our avatars on the xBox website and save the images to my computer. Now, because I had to put mine in a red dress, I had to load the image into Paint and change the red dress into a long white dress.

I then loaded both of our images into PowerPoint along with some text and the simple heart graphic. It came out great, and I thought I was ready to upload it into VistaPrint. That’s where I hit my roadblock for this project. To upload your image into VistaPrint and actually get it to print out non-blurry, it needs to be a certain quality.

Mama Plaid to the rescue. My mom does web design for a living, so I sent the STD off to her to play around with until it would upload and print out clear for sure. She worked her magic right away so I could get the STDs ordered. VistaPrint has a handy dandy tool to create the back of the postcard right on their site, so all I had to do was add text. Easy peasy!

You’re probably wondering why in the heck I wanted to send my STDs out so early (I sent them back in October 2009) considering my wedding isn’t until October 2010. Well, most of my guest list will be traveling from out of town, and I wanted to give them time to save up for airfare and the hotel. If I were a guest, I know I’d appreciate the early warning.

They arrived in a little over a week even though I chose the slowest shipping method, which said it would take about three weeks to arrive. Yay for me! So I organized a little address party with my two co-MOHs, S and L, and we banged them out in no time thanks to my address collecting form I created on Google Docs. (Thank you, past Weddingbee Bees!)

Here’s a fun pic of me mailing them off the next day!

Did you send out STDs? Did yours turn out exactly like you dreamed?