A labor of love

My StDs were designed and printed in Stamford, Connecticut. I took the Metro North up to Stamford and met with my bridesmaid LA. Immediately, LA got to work in her home office. (She does this for a living!)

This is me giving her a thumbs up! I was pretty useless. At some point I have so many ideas that I become indecisive so I just provide general statements of approval.

We finally got them printed!!! This is LA checking out the prints and making sure they were consistent, making sure the black was black and all the edges were clean. She even washed and cleaned the printer after every 4-5 sheets. I love that my friends are perfectionist. :D

Then she cut and whole punched the individual save the dates. She punched little semi-circle notches in the side of the StDs because we tied a piece of twine around each invite. I thought it was a cute mnemonic device of sorts, since we used "tying the knot." I know it's a little cheesy but I like it :D

Because were were ignoring her cat, he made sure to remind us that he was around!

My job was to put holes in the calendars for the little heart shaped brads.

After designing the StDs, the next step was to line the envelopes. We went to Paper Presentation and picked up some high quality brown kraft paper envelopes and loads of scrapbook paper. I clearly couldn't pick just one so I picked up everything that caught my eye. Mr. Pancakes picked the one with the pink elephants.

Then I traced an envelope onto some cardstock to make a template.

Once I had the basic size of the envelope it was easy to figure out the size and spacing I wanted for the liner.
Then I cut out the template and just traced it onto the paper. This is actually the back of the paper. Mr. Pancakes was in charge of the cutting and the stuffing, and I did all the gluing.


Here's what they looked like when they were done!
Super easy and the whole project envelopes and paper cost a little less than $50.

This is the final product!

PSA: There are lots of StDs out there

Now that I finally have a date, I figure I should probably let people know. So what do you want to hear first, the good news or the bad news? The good news is that a good friend of mine, has offered to help design and print all my invites for me. She was actually my roommate in college for a semester before she transferred to design school and is now a fabulous product designer.

The bad news is, I am SO indecisive.

The first step is to find inspiration, but there are A LOT of options out there. One of my major problems is that I like things that don't even make sense for my wedding. When I see any idea that is particularly unique I have a hard time letting it go. I want to believe I can incorporate everything into my wedding.

After hours and hours and HOURS of searching I finally realized that the elements I like seem to fall into three general categories:

Calenders:

{Available here on etsy}

{The Wedding Chicks}

Destination

{Minted}
{Source}

Floral

{Minted}
{Minted}

This leads me to two questions: (1) How would I go about combining my favorite elements of these save the dates? (2) How coherent do your save the dates and invites have to be? Could the StDs just be the more whimsical, fun version of the invites? I would want to keep the same colors, fonts, and general feel but have the StDs be less elegant. So perhaps I would do a destination themed calendar for the save the dates and then tie in some of the destination feel to a more floral invitation suite. Thoughts?

Did you design/pick your StDs and invites at the same time or were they two totally separate decisions?