Weddingbee Blog

Now that we’ve got all our engagement photos back, it’s crunch time for our save the dates. We’d asked for a high-res version of one of our sneak-peek photos from Fotograffika so we could get a head start, but we both put off really doing anything about it until the disk of everything came in. We spent a night browsing Etsy together and finding photo save the dates that we both liked. The average price for someone to design it for you seemed to be about $15, which is really just a drop in the bucket of wedding spending. But…all of the designs we liked were so simple, we decided to try to do it at home.

I dusted off my mad Photoshop skillz (ha!) and got to work. I’ve had no training; I just learned by myself out of a desire to make funny pictures and icons for my very early blogging days. (I had a Livejournal in 2002!) 

Now, it’s been years since I made all those. Would I remember how Photoshop worked? Cinnamon Buns and I went to town on the one high-res photo we had:

(The fonts are Action Jackson and American Typewriter.) Please note that that isn’t our actual wedding-website address.

Not bad, but we decided to wait for the disk of all the photos to see if there was anything better. It was also a lot of trial and error to get to this place because I could barely remember what button does what in Photoshop.

Then the disk arrived with all our photos—I’ve already shown you a good sampling of the photos, so let’s just get into our save-the-date options, shall we?

(This font is Stereofidelic—I must like it since I used it in the graphic above that was made years and years before!)

This one I made based off of a joking comment Cinnamon Buns made one day before heading off to work. Don’t give me silly ideas—I will run with them! This photo was perfect for speech bubbles, but I feel like there’s some sort of manic expression on my face!

This one I loved because of the bookshelves in the background. I thought it was a very “us” photo, and the books tie it in to our wedding “theme.” I don’t believe that save the dates have to match everything—I think they’re a really fun way to do something a little different from the rest of your wedding. But this seemed too perfect not to use!

With each one I made, the process got easier, I remembered tips and tricks, and I was enjoying myself again! This heart one made me really happy, and I liked that I worked our wedding colours into the save the date without it getting into the too matchy-matchy realm. No books in this one, just our smiling faces.

Now, as I said in the beginning, we were in a time crunch when making these. Because we decided to include them with our Christmas cards, there’s a very real deadline as to when we had to pick one and take it to the printer. We had been planning on using a local printer rather than somewhere online—luckily there are two printers within walking distance of our house who could easily do this for us in 24 hours. Cinnamon Buns and I decided that to choose, we’d each pick our top two, expecting that that would narrow it down to one we both loved. (This strategy worked with photographers!) Turns out, we really are on the same wavelength! We both like the bookshelf one and the heart one equally. Uh oh!

In the interest of full disclosure, we have already had these printed, and most are sent (see above re: time crunch). But, had I planned better and had time to ask you, hive, which save the date would you have chosen for us? Don’t worry—I’ll reveal them in their full glory soon!