Save the Date! (Part III)

With Save the Dates 1) designed 2) printed and 3)envelopes in hand, you'd think the hardest part was behind us.  You'd think. 

**Advice Alert** Start sending Christmas/Holiday cards.

If you aren't married yet, but you think that you may get married some day, start sending holiday cards.  (If you're already married, you may send holiday cards too!)  First off, its so fun getting Christmas cards that it'd be nice to spread the love.  Second, people are so excited to get your card that the excitement actually travels around the world (or across state lines) to fill you with the excitement of that card so you get to enjoy it too! (no joke!) Third (and the most relevant for this post) it means you'll start collecting and keeping up with your friends' addresses so that when you need to send them something really important like an edible arrangement, Halloween card or Save the Date! you totally already have their address!

Despite the fact that Javs and I do send cards during the festive season, we still struggled  to get all the names and addresses needed for the Save the Dates (cause people move *cough* the Bottoms *cough* and cousins go off to college and some of your friends who are dating live together and some of them don't and some you only know one address for and therefore need to find the other.....)  Just trust me, its a lot.  So start now!  Send cards!

This was also the first time we had to re-address those lists that we made waaaay back in October.  There was a Staples family list, a Cabezas family list and an Aud & Javs list and we needed to decide who exactly would be receiving these fabulous Save the Dates off of those lists.....but I'm saving 'the guest list' for another post.....



I'm not sure if you can see it, but they all
have a scripted 'Love' included on them.

Lets get back to the fun stuff :)  Yes another trendy idea on the wedding scene today is to use your stamps to make a statement.  Brides are tracking down vintage stamps, or getting  $.05 or $.20 stamps so they can use a bunch of them to kind of decorate their envelopes.  They do look really cool, but as I've said, I was officially in head down, rush mode.  So Javs and I browsed the current stamps available at the good ole post office so that I could run grab what we needed at lunch.  The USPS does have some 'wedding' stamps that are (I think) always available, but they tend to be more traditional and didn't really fit our feel.  we wanted something fun!  something happy :)  Something that screamed love! and joy! (wow, a lot of pressure for a stamp)  We settled on these bad boys.  They were romantic, but whimsical and felt more consistent with what our guests would see when they opened up their envelope.  (we did not use the dove stamps....yes I bought extra sheets so that we didn't have to use the dove ones because I thought they were too traditional and not colorful....brides are crazy, what can I say.)

Now to get all those complete and accurate addresses onto the envelopes that were prepared with these delightful, colorful stamps....we considered doing labels, but Mrs. Cabezas had kindly offered to address them.  Javier and I knew that she had beautiful, script-like handwriting, but were worried about the time it would take to have her address 100+ envelopes.  While we're making some more modern or less traditionally decisions regarding the wedding elsewhere, I'll totally admit that I'm a sucker for a beautifully, hand addressed envelope.  Maybe even more today, in our world of emails and texts and facebook messages, its truly beautiful to hold in hand, that time and effort. Labels would have been absolutely fine!  It just felt the right amount of special for the wedding to have them addressed by hand!  Needless to say, we took her up on her offer!  She continued to tell us it wasn't bad, but I can only imagine the hand cramps after writing so many!  (not to mention, she wrote the return address on all the backs of the envelopes too!)  I thought they turned out so beautiful and we are eternally grateful for all of her hard work!

Woohoo!  Lets get these out the door!  Dedicated MOH, Kelsey Bottoms, came over for an early morning stuffing session (and was even together enough to document the event).  We had a pretty good system going, Kels stuffed and sealed, I read every line of the address to Javs, he cross referenced our master list to ensure names and addresses were correct.  We did not put a 'Yes' in that Save the Date column until everything had been confirmed.  (I'll tell you now - there will be some mistakes - just be ready for it.  We caught a lot of them during this session...wrong zip code or misspelled name...but you're probably still going to get some returned to you, not a big deal!  We had 4 returned - but one was Ando's that we were attempting to send to Australia without writing 'Australia' on it, so it totally doesn't count)

This is our postwoman!

We were planning a trip down to the post office (especially b/c I had heard through my blogs that the post office prefers you to sort and bundle your envelopes when you're sending such a bulk out), but as we were discussing our plans, heard the clear *clink* of our own mail box opening and closing!  Javs rushed out to ask our postman (actually postwoman, we learned!) the best way to handle our outgoing mail.  She was super nice and said she'd be happy to take the whole lot for us!  She even gave a sweet smile for our silly picture.  We certainly had some stragglers (addresses we were still waiting on, or envelopes that were addressed wrong on the first go-round)  but our save the dates were in the mail!