Save the Date! (Part I)

Javs is supposed to be blogging about our amazing find for a rehearsal dinner spot, but since he is slacking busy, I'll do some catching up on my blog posts!  Updating you guys on our Save the Dates is way overdue, but since you've hopefully received yours by now (except for Jo) its not like we've been holding you in total suspense.  But for the sake of documentation and honest divulging - I'll give the back ground on the birth of these babies.

Since google docs is blocked at my place of work(probably thanks to emma *cough*cough*) I've been creating draft emails to myself in gmail and storing wedding data in there.  My 'Save the Date' email draft is pretty out of control with links to all the sites I was looking to explore when it came to save the date time.  While I browsed these a bit, I'll completely admit that our engagement pictures really put the brakes on the idea of ordering an already-designed or templated save the date.  Javier and I weren't sure we were even going to use a picture for our save the date, but after looking through our favorite pictures from the e-session, I knew that there were a few I would be excited to share with our attendees via the save the dates.  As you read, I loved some of the pictures Andrea and Brian captured of me and Javs on our sofa at home and threw together this draft early in February (in about 90 seconds at my desk at work).  And so the idea to design our own save the dates began.

Kelsey kindly allowed us to use her photoshop and away we went.  Which is to say that we progressed ever so slowly through the maze of photoshop with little knowledge and less patience.  I must have googled 'how do you ____ in photoshop' about 12982743 times while working on the design of these bad boys.  But google (per usual) was super helpful and so we stumbled along creating a few options, tweaking spacing, fonts, colors, etc.  I'll be totally honest here; I really do love a lot about our save the dates, but I know I would still be tweaking these details, rearranging and shifting today if there hadn't been some pressure to get these out the door.  I guess its the blessing and curse of designing your own stuff - you can create it to be exactly how you want it, but its you that also has to declare it 'done.'  If you have even the slightly drop of perfectionism in you, that can be hard to do (it was something I struggled with a great deal).

In addition to designing our own, we also needed to make a decision on a fairly trendy save the date idea: to magnet or not?  There are some obvious advantages of sending out save the dates that are also magnets. The number one being that people will immediately stick it on their frig making it less likely to be lost in the shuffle.  This ritual leads to the other advantages; people will look at your date over and over (cause everyone goes in the frig) making it more likely that they will actually remember the date of your wedding, repeatedly (cause, lets face it - you probably go in there a lot) seeing the couples' smiling faces will build excitement and anticipation for the day of the wedding, and lastly, the joy that one can find only within the frig will begin to be associated with the couple making it more likely that the attendee will also feel joyous at the wedding.

While these advantages were appealing, there were some advantages to non-magnet save the dates that we wanted to consider as well; they are cheaper, they can be two sided! and your guests 98.73% of the time are going to stick it on the frig (using a magnet they already own) anyway so you'll absorb all the advantages listed above.  Sold.  We would go non-magnet and include a backside to our save the date.  In the end, this was extremely helpful because we could include some encouragement for our guests to book rooms for the, now football, weekend in Cville.  (book your rooms people!)  So we added 'back design' to our tasks to complete using photoshop and pressed on.