Weddingbee Blog

A little while back I posted about some save-the-date inspiration. I’m finding more and more that writing my thoughts out and putting inspiration pictures all together really helps me make my mind up…because just a few short days after that post, I finally finally made a decision and ordered our save the dates.

I kept coming back to the two below. I couldn’t get over how adorable the banner was in this first one, and the gray chevron stripes in the second one make my heart pitter patter.

Image via Minted / Design by Ashley Moura

I was really struggling with finding a background for all of my previous designs and kept skipping over the chevron graphic because I thought it was too modern for the feel we were going for, but then I remembered this from my invitation searching, a banner and chevron together:

I loved the combination of the chevron and the banner, but I wanted the banner to be more free flowing. The invitation below has been in my invite-inspiration folder forr-evah; I am so in love with this invitation, there was no way I wasn’t going to use it as my inspiration foundation.

I had accomplished the background for a graphic element and the banner for a whimsical touch. On to the wording: I had used the Wedding Chicks templates very early on in our engagement and remembered loving the wording on one of the templates, so I stole graciously copied it. I now had my fun statement that I wanted to incorporate.

I knocked out the design in an afternoon and was ready to order. (The trickiest part was creating the perfect banner. Remember, I’m using our good friend Microsoft Word, and yes they have an “insert, shape, banner” option, but it was too structured; I was dreaming of the free-flowing, softer edges of the banners like the invitation above. After hours of playing around, I found the “edit points” in the drawing tools and started manipulating the standard banner into my own, and voila…no longer rigid.)

I had read tremendous reviews about Vistaprint and signed up a few months ago. Well, in the first part of June I received an email for 100 FREE postcards plus free uploading of images. This helped put a fire under my ass, since I only had one week to get my order in. I opted for the color front and gray-scale back, and then paid $8.99 for matte recycled paper rather than the free gloss version. That put my total order including shipping and processing to $17.47…or seventeen cents per save the date. I ordered the slow option, 21 days, but much to my surprise they arrived 14 days later!

Here they are, our save the dates:

The front and back