Save the Dates!

I am so excited to blog about this, because we finished a large item on our wedding to-do list! John and I will be sending out our save-the dates tomorrow!

The knot.com tells us we're overdue on this, but better late than never! The save the dates are simple; just a colorful, vintage reminder with a link to the wedding website.

Since this is an informal reminder, we chose to send them just to our families. Most of the younger guests are internet-savvy enough that an email (with a pic uploaded of the save-the-date design) will suffice. The important thing is that the date and place are announced and that we can point them to the website, where the rest of the information about the day will be located.

My vision for the paper goods in the wedding was to have something colorful, vintage-inspired, and printed at home. I love well designed invites, but I didn't want to pay a stationer (we don't have limitless money for this wedding!). If I wanted the design to just be simple script font on an ivory paper, then sure, engraved or letterpress would be the way to go. But, knowing I wanted to go with something more colorful, I figured a simple printing on cardstock would be the best way to go; after all, it's not like people are going to hold on to our paper goods forever; I'll put them in a scrapbook and most people will throw them out after the wedding.

So then I saw a beautiful, 1920s inspired wedding whose paper goods had me swooning. I first saw it on Style Me Pretty, then followed the links to the bride's blog, where she posted her inspiration board for the invites.

All images © Amy and Stuart Photography 

I was instantly in love with the bright colors, the vintage fonts and styling...sigh. I read on the bride's blog that she was inspired by vintage French perfume and soap labels, so I began searching on etsy and found a bunch of digital collage sheets for about $1.50 a piece. Definitely within our budget!

From there, I cropped the images out individually, and got to work learning photoshop (actually, Gimp, the freeware version of photoshop) to figure out how to edit out the text and change colors to my liking.

So, the actual save-the-dates started like this:

I loved the font and realized I had most of the letters for the words Save the Date (including at fabulous S  at the beginning of Savon). So, with patience, I constructed the letters I didn't have. Once we decided on  our color palette, I decided to make the background the light mint green.

The D on date isn't perfect, but I think overall the design works really well. The second font I used was Gutenberg MF, which I thought matched well with the more ornate title text. From there, I just had to flip the image and add the relevant text to make side 2. The finished product is a 3" x 6" card that fits in a standard envelope.

After we printed them out, we stuffed them in envelopes and printed out address labels to save time. But I still felt like it was missing something, so I designed a little sticker for the envelope flap (I had sticker paper lying around).

Here's some photos of the end result!

Ta-daaaaa! Now, we have to send the save-the date emails and then I can move on to the invitation design!