Weddingbee Blog

Since I’m the first one out of my friends and cousins to get married, I honestly did not know what a save the date was before diving headfirst into wedding blogs. “Save the date?” What were these wedding blogs talking about?! I always loved all things paper, but I thought wedding invitations and thank you cards were the only paper products we’d purchase for our wedding.

Boy was I wrong! As soon as I figured out that these wedding blogs weren’t talking about those kind of STDs, I was on board. Save the dates, we would have! And gosh darn it, we were going to have the prettiest STDs our friends and family would ever receive (and…enter stage left: my OCD and competitiveness).

First, I started eyeing up a classic favourite, letterpress:

Image via Small Printer

I was pretty convinced, and still am, that letterpress printing is an amazing choice not only for wedding stationery, but also for day-to-day personal stationery like birthday cards and thank you cards. It is such a beautiful medium that can’t be replicated with modern digital and offset printing. But…the cost. It is so.darn.costly. The paper is expensive, the machines are expensive, the process is time-intensive (also known as…expensive!). Everything about letterpress is expensive.

I couldn’t justify the costs of letterpress for the STDs. (But I’m saving my letterpress dreams for invitations and other goodies.)

So I started checking out less expensive options. Namely, Vistaprint. Vistaprint is the holy grail of cheap printing, and they don’t do too bad of a job either. They have several paper choices and lots of templates to choose from. They also have the option to upload a custom design, as long as it fits within the template size and has a minimum 300 dpi resolution. Perfect! These are some of the beautiful designs we loved from Vistaprint:

Images via Vistaprint

With a bunch of the free offers they run, our save the dates could cost under $30, including delivery. This was a price that was less than 10% of what we were quoted for letterpress and allowed us to possibly customize our STDs!

But…I started worrying that Vistaprint STDs wouldn’t be meeting my goal of “having the prettiest STDs our friends and family will ever receive.” I wanted to add a little DIY to the Vistaprint STDs to “make them prettier.” Visions of vintage stamps, calligraphy, and shimmer envelopes danced in my head for weeks before we finally decided on a custom design and placed our order.

Did you find it hard to nail down a concrete vision for your save the dates? Did you go all out and buy the creme de la creme of paper products (letterpress!), or did you use an inexpensive option like Vistaprint?