Weddingbee Blog

Our save the dates have been printed! We got off our butts and went to Kinko’s today. We figured they’d be the most English-friendly printing solution. We were wrong. We had a terrible experience gettin’ ’em done.

Here it goes. We wanted simple save the dates. No fuss, no muss postcards to save on paper and postage. We used an image from our e-pics and tried to do something fancy with it and gave up. We saved the image that we wanted to use onto Mr. G’s awesome Optimus Prime memory stick and quickly typed up the back of the postcards. I had seen Mrs. Yorkie’s save the dates and really liked them, so we, uhhhhhhh, pretty much copied them.

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We saved that to the memory stick and high-tailed it to the nearest Kinko’s. Once we got there, the store clerk started asking us all these questions… “How long do you want to be on the computer?” “Mac or PC?” “Photoshop or Illustrator?”

Uhhhhh dude, wtf are you talking about? He led us to a computer and basically told us to have at it. Hold on a sec dude…come back here! What are we supposed to do with this? Turns out they wanted us to use their computers (that they were charging us time for!) to format our postcards onto Illustrator. Three problems with that: 1) we don’t know how to use Illustrator, 2) it’s all in Japanese, 3) Ummm. No. What kind of service is this? We figured there would be some kind of self-service machine or we’d just hand them the memory stick and they’d do a little magic on one of their computers and voila! Save the dates are done. Ahhh, if only life were ever that simple.

Initially, the dude told us it would be cheapest to print four images onto one A4 piece of paper. When we told him we didn’t know how to use Illustrator, he laughed at us and went and got some other dude. Other dude asked if we knew what we were doing, we said no, more laughter. Then he basically told us that if we didn’t know how to put four images on a piece of paper, then we’d have to print one image to a page. Wow, wasteful and expensive. We played very, very dumb; he sighed, then did it for us. He said it would take too long for him to figure out the four images, so he did two per page then walked off. He came back with the images on regular paper, we OK’d them, and he had us choose the paper we’d use for the postcards. Oooooh, glossy glossy. About 20 minutes, tons of frustration, and $50 later we had our STDs!

We (aka Mr. Glasses) tried to cut them on their craptacular cutters, but it wasn’t working out. We decided to use scissors—yeah, we give up easily. We headed to a stationery store and grabbed some fancy pens for addressing and a curve punch to round the edges of our STDs. We tried to find some nice address labels that we could just feed through a printer but couldn’t find any that fit. We’re gonna have to do that by hand, too. Fun all around!

(all photos are personal unless otherwise noted)

There they are in all their glory. Ready to be cut, rounded, and addressed. So simple yet so stressful.

(In the middle of writing this post, I realized our wedding website was wrong on them and had to create a new one according to the address on the STDs and transfer eeeeeverything.)

Did you run into any bumps in the road with your DIY attempts?