Weddingbee Blog

In the first of many wedding-related printings, postings, and mailings (don’t even get me started on how many stamps we are going to need), we have ordered our save the dates!

STDs officially announce the date of your wedding and let guests know that they will be invited to your happy celebration. They are not required, so you don’t have to send them if you don’t want. However, giving guests advance notice helps to increase your chances that your guests will be able to attend.

They are probably the first wedding-related item that your guests will come into contact with, so it is a great time to set the tone and theme of the day. But it is also the time to be less formal and gives you the opportunity to get your creative juices flowing. I’ve seen an STD for a destination wedding that had a bottle filled with sand, shells, and a little slip of paper with the STD information on it. Another popular trend is to have yours printed on magnets for the kitchen fridge or make them in postcard form. The possibilities are really endless!

Image and Design via Passion Paper

Image via Antonia Rose Printing and available for purchase

Design by jamiejonet on Etsy / Image via The Oceanside Bride

Once you’ve got your date, venue, and budget set (the three most important things you need to get started with planning—but that is for another post!), it should be clear as to how many guests your venue can comfortably hold and what you can afford. Keep in mind that starting to finalize your guest list is an important step to complete before you send your STDs. After all, once you tell someone to save your wedding date, they need to receive an actual wedding invitation as well.

There are many different directions you can take when you decide to get them made. If you want all of your wedding stationery (invitations, menus, programs, thank you cards) to match, then now is the time to decide how your wedding paper is going to be made. DIY? Couture stationery designer? Etsy? Online stationery store? Are you crafty? Is wedding stationery one of your highest priorities?

Decide what is the right avenue for you as a bride.

Mr. High Wire works in marketing and publishing, so he started working with a graphic designer he knew through work to get them designed. He wanted them to be one of a kind and had been pleased with the designer’s work previously, so it was an easy decision for us to take this route.

I gave a few keywords and color ideas (vintage, birds, birdcage, browns, tans, deep greens), and she put together four designs for us to look at. We chose one of those and, after a little tweaking here and there, it finally looked perfect to us.

I’m so pleased to share this with you all!

We are ordering our STDs through an online stationery store called Vistaprint. Word of advice: They are really great if you don’t mind thumbing through a bunch of various offers during checkout. Just stay at the bottom and keep clicking next.

We also ordered our holiday cards last year through the same company and were very pleased with the results.

They have the option to upload our own design or have endless pre-made designs if “one of a kind” doesn’t matter to you. I really love some of the designs they have!

Here are our pre-made designer return-address labels that we also ordered with our STDs for our wedding paper products.

The cost for our order, if you are interested, was $77.04 and it included 60 cards, 60 envelopes, and 420 return-address labels. Not too bad! Miss Snow Cone has tips to get an even sweeter deal than we did. I highly recommend you check out her post on the subject.

We opted for the slllowww (21 days) shipping since that was the least expensive option.

We’re sending them out a little earlier than recommended, but our wedding is taking place at a somewhat “destination” location. Only two family members actually live in Weatherford. But it is an “in between” of sorts for our two families, so that is why we picked it. Either way, we want people to have plenty of time to decide to either book a hotel or drive in for the day.

And with that, our first wedding-stationery project has been taken care of and will be to us in no time! (Or, you know, 21 days. Whatever.)

Did you send STDs out for your wedding? Do you like receiving them from family and friends who are getting married?