Our save the dates!

3 February 2012

Happy Friday, friends! Fridays make me happy, and so does getting things in the mail, so what better day to post about our save the dates than today?

As you all know, we were choosing between a few different Minted designs. You overwhelmingly preferred the “Midnight Vineyard” style, and it turns out we did, too! We loved how the strings of light evoke an elegant evening garden party feel, which is exactly what we’re going for. However, as some of you also noted, the green ink was not the best choice for us. Here’s the original design again:

Thankfully, Minted is awesome about customizations, so we easily switched out the font (for something more classic), swapped the ink color (for a pale powder blue), and made a few text layout changes. We also opted for a solid-colored backer. It’s the same pale powder blue, though it’s kind of hard to tell in photos (and, truthfully, in person… should have made it a little darker!). Here’s the final design we ended up with!

Pretty! We also wanted a patterned envelope liner. Midnight Vineyard has a standard liner design, which looks like this:

However, that was a little too matchy-matchy for me, so we opted to swap the standard liner for the liner that comes with the Kraft Ribbon Christmas card:

Voila!

Now, to get these babies ready for their big adventure! I addressed each with my best handwriting, popped on my favorite stamps, and subbed in a custom rubber stamp from Rubberstamps.net for handwriting our return address on every envelope. For those who are interested, we ordered the 3 inches by 1.5 inches size, and I uploaded a custom design I made in Illustrator. I purposefully opted to leave our last names off, because this way, we can use this stamp even after we’re married! A very good $16 investment if I do say so myself.

Thank you very much to my friend Nancy Ray for taking these photos!

With everything addressed and stamped, all that was left was to box the pretties up and take them to the post office.

Which we did, on a very busy Saturday morning.

Yes, I am the ding dong that made my fiance take a photo of me in front of the post office.

Despite the line, I bravely asked the postmistress if I could hand cancel the stamps once we got to the front. She really didn’t want to let me, but eventually caved to my winning smile :) (Don’t worry, we stepped to the side while we worked so as not to hold up the line!) Why did I care about hand canceling? It avoids your mail being run through the machine, which imparts not-so-lovely neon markings and often mashes them up a bit, too. When you hand cancel, you just get a charming, old school stamp on the front. Tip for others who would like to hand cancel: make sure you stamp OVER your postage stamp (that’s what you’re canceling, get it?). Otherwise, your envelopes will be run through the machine anyway, and you’ll incur the wrath of the USPS to boot.

I’m so happy with how everything turned out! I did feel a good bit of anxiety as I worked on these, though, and I couldn’t understand why. Finally I concluded that it’s because sending out save the dates makes your guest list very real. These people are invited, and these people are not. We ended up cutting down our initial guest list a few months back once budget realities started to sink in, and of course, we had to leave people off the list that we would have loved to invite. There’s understandably a degree of sadness that comes with that. However, I’m so excited to celebrate with those we are able to invite, and hope they’ll all be able to make the trip to Connecticut in September!!

Subscribe
Notify of

6 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
February 4, 2012 1:02 am

They look absolutely amazing! I’ve always wondered how people got their invitations to look so great. I’ve never heard of hand canceling before but it definitely makes sense and I love how they turn out as well!

Meg
February 9, 2012 3:17 pm

Could you post the template you used for your custom stamp? I’ve been trying to find the right font, and I love yours.

February 17, 2012 2:17 am

Em,
Thank you for posting the process of sending out your Save-the-Dates. Like they say, the devil’s in the details; many brides don’t consider hand canceling and it makes a big difference! Also, you definitely do NOT look like a ding dong for posing in front of the post office–You’re commemorating your wedding process!

I have some adorable wedding tips and inspiration at Wedding Ideas Now

Meg
February 17, 2012 9:03 am

Thank you so much, the font suggestions are really helpful!

February 24, 2012 11:42 am

Could you be any cuter in the post office pic?

The hand canceling idea is such a great little tip! Thanks for sharing!