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!

Save the Date! (Part II)

Javs didn't love the first picture I sent (the one in my quick/at work mock-up) because it didn't really show our faces and he thought it might be just a bit off for a Save the Date.  I eventually agreed.  And then it was so easy to choose which photo we did want to use after that - it seems silly to me (now) I didn't go with it in the first place!  It was the 'us' (don't you guys get sick of me saying that...) that I was hoping would be captured during our session with Andrea and Brian.  (no we don't always just flop on our sofa...) but we looked happy and comfortable.  It wasn't posed and it felt real.

We mocked up a couple of options in photoshop (him taking over when I got too frustrated and me asking for the computer back when I thought he was working too slowly.  Its sounds chaotic, but I think we were a pretty good team!)  and sent them to our family and wedding party for some opinions.  Luckily, their favorite was almost unanimous!  We had our front and back ready!  Now, to print them....

Thank goodness, in addition to save the date sites, I had also been keeping track of some printing sites (just in case!) that were recommended on my wedding blogsl.  We did a little price comparison and looked at different paper options with each place.  In the end, it was http://www.catprint.com/ that was the winner.  They were super reasonably priced and had good reviews (although not a ton of them).  We were also excited that they would send a free hard copy of our design for approval before the big print job!

**Here is where Javier and I made a mistake**

I swear I didn't want to open the box without Javs...

I will say that the Catprint customer service staff was super helpful (although not always as quick as I wanted them to be).  We sent off our designs, feeling the early light of accomplishment brushing our faces...only to have their team inform us that our files were not the right size and we would more than likely have some stuff cut off in the print if we stuck with what we had sent.  Hmm...Here started days of going back and forth with new files, many phone calls, and hesitancy from Catprint until they finally thought our design would print well. (by the way, I think it really was user error on our part - as I've mentioned, we were not photoshop experts)  Now, here comes the mistake: we were feeling some pressure to get these printed and out the door and therefore decided to fore go the hard copy approval before having our 100+ save the dates printed. They sent us a digital copy, but since the hard copy would take a few days to arrive and then we'd have to approve it before they even began printing, we said yes to the digital copy so they'd just hurry up and hit PRINT!

but he told me too!

You guys have seen them - they are, overall, very pretty.  We've gotten lots of compliments about them and I'm completely reassured when I hear people say how well they think the cards fit our style.  (YAY!)  But the truth is, if I had gotten this version as a hard copy, I definitely would have made some changes before having 100+ printed.  Oh well, I was pretty sad about it for a day (crazily contemplated having them all reprinted), but then realized it was really no big deal and I had to get over it. 

so i did :)

It is however a good example of the 'getting so caught up in it' that you kind of lose your senses a bit.  We were talking a matter of days that approving a hard copy might have added as far as getting these out to our guests.  But in that moment, I was so panicked and focused on getting them out exactly 6 months  before the wedding, that we rushed and made a mistake.

Lesson learned though: 1) start invitation stuff earlier (Javs and I have already started looking!) 2) two days will not matter, check and double check to make sure its what you want 3) even if its not perfect, its probably just you that is freaking out about it - everyone else is going to say 'they were lovely' and get on with their lives....

Great!  Now we have these beautifully designed, perfectly printed Save the Dates :)  but we got to get them to folks....we need envelopes.  So we spent a quick, ok reasonable, few hours in Paper Source looking at all the different paper options we had for the envelopes.  My goodness, I could get lost looking at paper in that store but I'll spare you the play by play recap of our time there.  Know that we pulled a bunch of envelopes we thought fit our 'colors,'  did a couple rounds of veto-ing, tried a few pen options on each and ended up buying 3 different colors so that we could decide later.  (Another mini mistake - we didn't have our physical Save the Dates yet and wanted to see how they would actually look with each envelope before we decided - so wait til you have your save the dates in hand to go envelope shopping -ooops!)

In the end we decided that we wanted to stick with the brown tones (our Save the Date was going to have a sepia finish).  We figured there would be other opportunities to bring in color and it just felt more consistent with what we were going with on the cards.  This ended up being a decision we were really happy with later.... :)

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.