Weddingbee Blog

We decided that we’ll send out save the dates since a decent percentage of our guests are from out of town. I previously mentioned the magnets that Mr. E designed for our STDs, and now I’ll show you our mock-up of the cards that we will be sending them in.

It’s pretty simple—we used the same scrapbook paper that we’re using for all of our signs around the reception. The card is made from 12×12 blue card stock, cut in half. I trimmed the width from six inches to five-and-a-quarter inches. The matting under the text comes from the same 12×12 green card stock that created a hurdle for me when doing the mock-up of our invites. I measured the three different mattings and found that I could fit two cards on one sheet of 12×12. I made tracers to make it faster to trace and then cut out.

Tracing and cutting these bad boys took some time. After the hard part of tracing and cutting, all that was left was to glue down the text parts and then cut little slits for the magnets.

Here’s the front with our monogram, designed by Mr. E:

And here’s the inside. On the left will be the hotel information for our guests. The right holds the magnet and our wedding website information.

Of course, after making these I remembered that postage costs more for square invites, but I like them too much to change them—at least for right now. Talk to me again after we have to shell out the extra money at the post office, lol.

Because these were just mock-ups, and I’ve had some extra time to see other inspiration and change my mind on projects, we’ve decided to go in a bit of a different direction for the final version. Oh, how I hope this doesn’t affect me with every project.

I’m not changing the inside because I like it just the way it is, but I was thinking that the front could use a little more “travel” inspiration to tie in with our wedding theme. I played around with a couple ideas and ended up with a cute alternative to the simple square front.

Using MS Word, I took the “Save The Date”  heading and our date and placed them into a luggage-tag shape. I then made a faint gray text box for the words “Miss E and Mr. E are getting married!” and added blue and green suitcases (from clip art) to the bottom corner. Since I had already cut out green card stock as matting for the front, I made sure the two pieces could be cut from that.

I glued the pieces together using my adhesive runner, and here is the final product:

Through trial and error, our save the dates have transformed from a simple white card stock note card (please, no laughing—this mock-up was prior to my introduction to the amazing world of wedding-blog stalking)…

…to colorful card stock squares, which give an early hint of our travel-themed reception.

Our save the date, photographed by Lynn Michelle

Our magnets have (sadly) transitioned from DIY projects to PSE (pay someone else) projects, but they still make me smile and get the job done! I can’t wait to see our smiling faces on our friends’ and families’ refrigerators.

I ordered the square white envelopes from envelopemall.com and spruced them up a bit by embossing “Save the Date” on the front corner. I found that stamp on sale for about 40 cents while standing in line at Michaels.

Originally, I thought about doing labels, but I decided to hand write the addresses to complete the homemade feel. It’s no calligraphy, but I did buy a fancy Sharpie fine-point blue marker (and used a coupon on it) and it’s readable!

Mr. E was in charge of stamping our address on the back of each envelope, and for the most part, he was a champ. There are a few where a part of the address or our names didn’t stamp. Oh well. I got over it (practicing that whole Zen-bride thing). We’ll just blame it on the stamp pad.

Once the magnets came in, I attached them to the cards using photo corners.

I took one to the post office to get the correct postage, since I knew the square envelopes would cost more to mail, and I mailed it to ourselves to make sure there were no issues. Let’s just say it was a good thing I didn’t bother to wait to receive our save the date because, guess what? Yeah, it got lost in the mail and took forever! I went ahead and mailed all the others the next day (ugh, 81 cents a piece. I’m pretty sure our invites will mail for less), and guests started receiving them within a day! Yay!

I received a text from our usher Brett which said “…seriously, it is the best save the date I’ve received—and I couldn’t be more excited 4 u 2!” That tells me all the hard work was worth it.

Was there any part in your planning process that made the wedding feel more real?