

When Mr. Pinot Noir and I decided on a destination wedding, we knew that we would need to send out Save The Dates so our family and friends could begin making their arrangements. While sending an evite might have been the most eco-friendly option - most of our extended family is not comfortable with technology (as in they don’t have email) so that would have made things rather difficult.
Long ago (pre-engagement) I had fallen in love with the idea of doing a photo booth style save-the-date. After our engagement, I researched all of the photo booths in New York City and compiled a list based on location, price and quality. I planned to take the pictures with super cute cards and then reproduce copies of the photostrip. But then I started to worry (this is not unusual). How many tries would we need to get the right combination of photos. How many booths would we need to visit to get a decent quality? I decided to make a postcard using the photostrip images, and then we wouldn’t need to use envelopes and we would save money and paper (no envelopes!). Visions of creative, unique, DIY save-the-dates danced in my head.

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Since our wedding was only 7 months away, we considered not sending out Save the Dates. But my high-strung personality was scared of attempting to DIY the invites, programs and place cards without first trying something a little easier first, JUST in case I freak out and have to be taken away in a straight jacket.
My 21 year old cousin, who is one of my bridesmaids, attends Rhode Island School of Design and is amazingly talented. I asked her if she would be able to create a few characters for us to use on save the dates, place cards, and other little things throughout the wedding. It was a huge favor but she was very excited to help out with something she was good at. A couple of weeks later, she sent me this:

… Save the Dates, that is!
I almost forgot to show your our STD cards because I’m so excited about our invites, but first things first! Our STDs were sent to our guests way back in April, since we wanted to give people plenty of time to start saving money and planning to travel to New Orleans. After some hemming and hawing about whether to order our STDs online or do them ourselves, Mr. Sweet Tea and I finally decided to design them ourselves and print them out through VistaPrint.
Some tips and resources that helped us save a lot of money on this:
Read more…
Our Save the Dates are finally complete and as far as I know have been received by almost everyone, so I can finally share all the pictures. I bought a rose clipart file from clipart.com and used Adobe Illustrator to change it to a light green color. Then I flipped and turned the graphic and placed different parts of it around the square. That’s all of them above, waiting to be stuffed and sent.
Because we got engaged at the Parkway Theater, I had a wonderful vision in my head for our Save the Date. We would be beautifully set in front of the Parkway, and I would use Photoshop to change the wording of the “Now Playing” sign to say “Save the Date: August 2008.” This was my inspiration (from knottie DynomiteWins):

…that we have the save-the-dates printed and mailed! JK. Nothing would make me back out of this.
After a bit of a wedding slump, the arrival of our save-the-dates energized me and Mr. Canary again. It was so exciting to see the design come to life. I couldn’t be happier with how they turned out and I couldn’t have done it without our amazing designers, Nicole and Erin of Bird and Banner.
From our first meeting with Nicole, we immediately felt that they understood us and the tone we were trying to set for the wedding. After Mr. Canary and I received the first set of sketches and concepts, we knew we had made the right decision by choosing Bird and Banner. The concepts were so great that we had a hard time deciding, but our favorite was the best fusion of Chinese culture within a modern context.
I interrupt my wedding re-cap to bring a smile to your face and to encourage you to think outside the box. I loved our save-the-dates, don’t get me wrong. But they were very traditional — they matched all our other stationery. I wanted to encourage you brides-to-bee (pun intended) with a sense of humor to not take your save-the-date’s too seriously.
Click to enlarge. Personal information has been blurred for privacy
Hi, my name’s Miss Chickadee and I’m a wedding procrastinator.
I’m proud to announce that it’s been almost an entire week and a half since my first (and hopefully last) major wedding breakdown, which was followed almost immediately by a wedding intervention courtesy of Big Sis & Mama Chickadee. Needless to say, it was an intervention worthy of Dr. Phil himself, complete with motivational speeches, list-making, and more than a few tears.
The good news is, I am a reformed Chickadee and the proud possessor of 100 COMPLETELY FINISHED Save the Dates. I also managed to check many many other things off my to-do list… including a few toughies like choosing a veil, shoes, and bridesmaid dresses!
Today though, is going to be completely devoted to my Save the Dates. I know what you may be thinking, though, “didn’t we already get a post about this?” Um, yes. Good memory. You’re right, I did already write about them… but they’ve changed. What can I say, it’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind.
Time to catch up on some paperwork. We knew we definitely wanted letterpress from the beginning. Well, I knew I wanted letterpress; after a quick primer and seeing some samples, Mr. L was on board, too.
I got estimates from a few different presses and exchanged a number of inquiries before deciding to go with Tara at Ephemera. Being somewhat less established, she put together a package that was substantially less than the others I’d considered.
Plus, to be honest, I just dig her personality. And I like how she approaches the project. We wanted a custom design to go with our Sweetest Type of Love theme, and she asked good questions. Not just about formality and fonts, but about the overall aesthetic I want. “Do you insist on symmetry or do you like things off-center? What keywords come to mind for your invitations? If your invitation were a celebrity, who would it be?” Ok, maybe not that last one.
In September, we started bouncing around ideas for the save-the-dates. I knew I wanted something pretty casual for these. I just like how the sophistication of the letterpress can anchor a simple, or even playful, design. I cobbled together the roughest of rough sketches in Paint, sent it to her, and she dutifully interpreted:
Now that Christmas is finally over and my FSIL (omg I’m using an abbv. that up until a few weeks ago I had no clue what it meant) got her gift, I can post about letterpress on weddingbee. I spent one weekend this december at a craft fair next to a lovely gal selling these beautiful letterpressed calendars by ilee. I came home with two and Mr. Milkshake was so impressed with them that the two thousand some odd dollars I had estimated for letterpressed invitations was suddenly okay with him.
