Save the Dates Made Easy

When I first met with my wonderful wedding planner, Adriel (Adriel Nutter Events), one of the very first things she told me was that Mr. Blue Moon and I needed to decide what to prioritize in our wedding budget. For example, some couples care more about great food and less about a great DJ. Or maybe we wanted to invest a significant portion of the budget into photography, and not so much into flower arrangements. After sitting down to discuss with Mr. Blue Moon, I quickly realized that he did not care one bit about invitations and stationary for the wedding. We could probably send all of our guests an e-mail or make our wedding a Facebook event, and Mr. Blue Moon would be fine. I, however, have a love affair with fancy paper.

Seriously. I can't go into most stores without stopping by the card section that sells thank you notes. I love to throw parties, if only to design and send invitations. I adore receiving mail, but I enjoy sending it even more. I have an entire drawer in my home office dedicated to cards, stationary, return address labels, and other accoutrements. I know, I know. I have a sickness. And before we even had a venue nailed down, I was lusting after gorgeous invitation suites and perfect save the dates.

How perfect are these Nashville skyline wedding invitations via My Lady Dye

Lavender Love invitations via SJ Wedding Invitations

Rustic save the dates from Sweet Invitation Co.

Sadly, our wedding budget, which is hovering somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000, does not leave a lot for invitations, and we originally had not even planned to have save the dates at all. But since I have so many friends getting married around the same time as Mr. Blue Moon and I, we have been receiving gorgeous save the dates and I really wanted to see if we could do some of our own affordably.

So we turned to Vistaprint. I don't know why I didn't think of Vistaprint sooner. I have heard nothing but good things, and while I'm still not sure if we will go with them for the invitations, it was a breeze to design my save the dates, and I even got to include engagement pictures like I had wanted.



It was as easy as selecting a design that I like, and putting in the relevant information. The hardest part was deciding which photos to use on our save the date cards! I selected this design. The website allowed me to preview before I purchased, and so I knew our cards would turn out something like this.

The front side, edited for anonymity.

I selected another one of my favorite photos to take up the entire back side of the save the date. We could have sent them as postcards, but I love cute envelopes way too much.

We were able to use a promotion code on our order, and since we only needed sixty of these bad boys, the entire order ended up being about $35.00. I threw in some matching address labels, paid extra for glossy paper, and of course, paid for shipping. All told, I was very happy with the quality of our save the dates for the price.

The only real extra I added was finding A1 kraft paper envelopes to send them in. I'm a sucker for envelopes and did not want to use the white ones that Vistaprint sends with their orders. They were the only part of my order that seemed kind of cheap to me. I found my envelopes at PaperAndMore.com and was very happy with the quality.

Of course, the final decision to make was how to address the fronts of the envelopes. My handwriting is completely atrocious, but I am also OCD about centering things and writing evenly. It's not a good match. So I decided to find a font I like to print the addresses on my envelopes. When it comes time to mail invitations, I hope to splurge on professional calligraphy.

I chose Janda Stylish Script, which I found here. They had plenty of other script fonts to choose from, too, so if you're thinking about going the home printing route, check this resource out!

 

Via A Practical Wedding

I wish I had saved a final product to show ya'll, but I'm terrible like that. I did, however, have the foresight to use one of the white Vistaprint envelopes to mail a save the date to Mr. Blue Moon and myself. Don't judge me, I wanted to have one to show posterity! 

Personal Photo

The finished products looked like this, but imagine them on kraft paper envelopes. I went with Summer Harvest stamps to give our guests a taste of the warmer months of the year since we're mailing these in the dead of February, but we will probably pick something more romantic to put on our formal invitations. 

So there you have it! My not-quite-DIY, cheap-and-easy guide to some swell looking save the dates. 

Are you mailing save the dates? How did you choose a look and design?