Weddingbee Blog

As part of my crazy idea to DIY the majority of our wedding, this meant that I would be hand-designing our paper products. I’m sure a friend somewhere that could have handled it for me and would have done so gladly, but my perfectionism just would not let this happen. I knew that I would change things a million times and that I did not want to put any friend though that. That left doing it myself.

Which then meant choosing which kind of save the date to go with. Mr. D suggested that we do magnets. This is because the save the dates we have received have all been magnets. They definitely are cute, and I always see them sitting on people’s fridges, even after the wedding has come and gone. We definitely found some inspirations ones that we liked:

Willow trees have always been my favorite tree. I love the way that this one’s little leaves are hearts and the initials carved into the trunk. Mr. D didn’t like it, he didn’t think it was really us.

Image via Wedding Paper Divas

I really liked the bright colors of this save the date. If we had done it, I probably would have used shades of our wedding colors. However, once again Mr. D was not a big fan, so this one was also nixed.

Image via MagnetStreet

Then we started considering the cost. Even DIYing a magnet, it would still cost us about $2.00 per STD. This was a little too much for our tastes. What is the point of DIYing if it meant you were still paying around the same for something while doing all the work for it? So we looked to the next thing.

Cards. Sure they were similar in aesthetics to invites, but they could be done super cute and super cheap. We really loved the bright colors of this one, and the simplicity of it:

Image Via Wedding Paper Divas

We also really liked this one, but more so for the humor. Especially because even to this day, Mr. D has a hard time remembering to put the lid down and it drives me nuts!!!

Image via MagnetStreet

This time the inspiration was easy to find, but we realized that we wanted something a little different. And then I saw this while looking for inspiration:

Image via The Wedding Chicks

It wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but I definitely realized that I wanted postcards. These were simply too cute not to do.

Now I’m sure you may or may not have noticed that none of our inspiration pictures were picture save the dates. This is because Mr. D and I are not getting our engagement pictures done until the middle of September and we needed to get our STDs out in the middle of July so our out of town guests have plenty of time to make travel arrangements. So we were looking for non-picture ideas. I started to fiddle around on my computer and after a couple of days and about 50 different versions, Mr. D and I had our save the dates. I shipped them off to Vistaprint to be printed and got those bad boys back about two weeks later. So here are our save the dates:

We took the picture while we were in vacation in Florida not too long ago. I am really pleased with how they turned out. They are simple, and best of all they were really affordable! I did Vistaprint during their free offers and got 100 postcards for free. I did have to pay extra to use my own template and to print in color on the back side. That all came to about $12. Shipping brought it up to $18. We sent out about 67 postcards, so when you include the 29 cent postage, our STDs came to about 56 cents apiece!

I’m so relieved that this part is over and one more project is off of my list! Now on to the next one!

Did you do save the dates? Did you do them yourself or buy them? How did you decide what kind of style to go with?