our save the dates!!

Well, here they are! Our first DIY wedding project! After much back and forth and working in different styles, I came up with this design for our save the dates. I really wanted to incorporate yellow (what’s a happier color than yellow?!) and since we are planning a fairly traditional wedding I wanted the save the date to be reflective of that. However, I also wanted to strike a balance and make sure the card design had the right amount of modern and wasn’t plain or overly fancy.

We really didn’t need to do magnets (above), but my Mom and I love getting magnets with invitations. The magnet design piggy-backed on Brendan’s website design (below), incorporating a floral illustration and transparency (the site navigation he designed uses transparencies, as does the type on the magnet). I was thrilled to find vellum-like coin envelopes to fit the magnets, since I’ll use vellum every chance I get. The hand stamped flaps were made on an impulse. Apparently I can’t leave any surface untouched…

One of my bridesmaids, Amy, helped me gocco return addresses on the back of the envelopes. It looks good but was also a big timesaver. It was my first experiment printing with a gocco, and I’m already trying to envision what part the gocco will play in our invitations!

The kraft paper envelopes made the whole package less formal (and therefore much better in my opinion!) The tabs on the envelopes with the addresses written on them are the strips of paper left over from printing the save the dates. The printer kind of laughed when I asked him to save all those 3 inch strips, but they were put to good use! Waste not want not!

Above is the set…

And this is the website Brendan designed and built for us. Since most of our guests will becoming from out of town, the site incorporates lists of restaurants, bars, activities, museums, and good shops in my hometown.

Here is a list of the vendors I used for this project:
Outer envelopes: French Paper
Paper: Neenah Paper
Sticky magnets: Office Depot
Custom stamp: Rubber Stamp Champ
Coin envelopes: Envelopes Express

After weeks of putting these together, it was really satisfying to dump them all in the mailbox! I’m pretty happy with the way they turned out, and once I had the design for the save the dates I was able to work backwards and come up with a whole color scheme and feel for our wedding. But that’s another day!