My Wedding in Real Time: My Save the Dates

Since my save-the-dates went out Saturday and people should be receiving them as early as today, or at least within this week if they're as far away as Quebec and Burgos, Spain as some of my guests are, I decided to share them with you.

I won't tell you my exact theme, although it may be kind of obvious if I did my job, and the colors used in the save-the-date are certainly my color scheme: a mustard yellow, turquoise blue, marigold orange, and a faded red.

I created my save-the-date's in Adobe Illustrator and then transferred them to Adobe InDesign for final layout and printing.

We created two copies of our save-the-date: one in English and one in French (as many of Guillaume's family and friends only speak French) and did the same with our wedding website. We went with projectwedding.com's wedding website in the end. I looked at a variety of sites (probably at least 6 different ones) and while others had items projectwedding.com didn't (like an online RSVP section or other great features) I went in the end with a site that was a) free and b) fit our theme. Although I will note, the site had problems when Guillaume tried to translate the French version into French with accents. More than once he was screaming at his computer, so I might recommend something else if you're wanting a site written in a different language.

Once I had designed the save-the-date's I contemplated making them into postcards. This would have been a much cheaper option (which I might recommend to others) but in the end I decided I wanted an envelope that continued my theme and kept a little bit more formality. I found the actual label design on paper-source.com but I couldn't afford their pricetag. So I showed one of my fellow coworkers and graphic designers the image, and she said it would be no problem to make herself. Thank you Bri!

I bought the labels from Office Depot (the cheapest place I found) in 2"x4" (Office Depot Brand) and got 250 labels for around $9. I only needed about 105, so this way I may be able to use them again for my invitation envelopes. I also borrowed a few sheets of clear address labels from work for my return addresses. It was only 4, so I don't feel too bad.

Once I mail merged all of the addresses with the label design (using MS Word), I printed them out and was ready to assemble. Oh I forgot to tell you that I purchased both red and turquoise envelopes from The Paper Zone as well for $5.99/50. I was just going to leave the labels "as is" without doing anything more, but my friend Kristin convinced me to actually cut out the designed label from its typical rectangle label shape. While it ended up adding hours of extra time to the end result, it did make a tremendous improvement to the overall look of the envelope.

Finally I added postage. Luckily my local post office carried the $.44 king and queen of hearts stamps (the closest thing to anything I liked and fit with the invite) and I bought one for each. Then I also bought specific stamps for our invitations to Quebec ($.75 each) and one for my bridesmaid in Spain ($.98 each). I saved a few dollars by not mailing any of my save-the-dates to people I saw often (like my mom or friend Kristin and my boss Ken).

So here's the end result! I really like how they turned out and I hope you do too! If you have questions about anything else I did, feel free and email me at triedandtrueweddings@gmail.com.

These images are the save-the-dates via "Paint", so that I could cover up the website addresses. Sorry the quality of the image appears to be bad.



...and these are actual pictures of the finished product:


Sorry, I had to take off the upclose pictures because our wedding website is too easily readable, and I have to maintain some sort of privacy. But hopefully these are good enough. :)