Early on in my wedding planning, I decided that I would endeavor to hand craft as much of my wedding as possible. After having scheduled lengthy time off for recovery from a surgery and knowing full well that I would be posted up on the couch for much of it, I proposed to make my own save the dates. I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted, but I knew what I didn’t want. I searched and searched and searched some more for just the right project.

A Martha Stewart website fiend, I came across these beauties. I loved them.

from marthastewartweddings.com

I was off to Archiver’s and to Joanne Fabric to pick up all my supplies.

Supplies:

• Hot glue gun/hot glue sticks
• 1 1/4″ Stickers (in lake and sage)

• A7 Flat Cards (luxe: in cream)

• A7 Envelopes (in sage)

• Gift Wrap (in lake/pool stripe)

• Ribbon (some coordinating ribbon)

• Glue Dots
• Printer
• Birdie Stamp
• Blue Stamping Ink

So,  I started by making a Word template on my computer to fit the A7 notecards. They said “Save-the-Date” at the top and “We’re getting married, please mark your calendar!”

I looked around the internet a little bit until I found a pre-made Word template for 1 1/4′ inch stickers. I used the WordArt utility to wrap our names and our date in a circle.

I got to work super early to run the stickers through the copier before anyone else got in. Things went really well until the very last sheet of stickers when they heated up so much that the stickers peeled off and stuck themselves all over the inside of the machine. I had to disassemble the entire copier and scrape of 20 stickers that said Pansy and Pansy Dude all over them.

Since the stickers come in little sets of 4, I cut them in 1/2. I took one of each color sticker and swapped it with another set so that each set of two had one blue and one green.

Glue the set of two stickers to the flat card.

Make a billion little bows to hot glue to the top of the flat card.

Using a coordinating gift wrap makes lining envelopes easy. Disassemble an envelope to make a template. OR Paper Source makes a kit full of envelope liner templates. When you start to glue the liners in the envelopes, only glue the top triangle-y part. If you glue the whole thing, it’s really hard to slip the liner all the way into the envelope.

So. Print on the cardstock. Hot glue the bows to the top of the card. Use 4 glue dots to adhere the strip of two stickers. Stamp a little bird on the front of the envelope. Slip them into the beautiful lined envelopes. I wish I had a finished product picture to show you, but alas, I sent these out long before I was a Bud.

Make Save the Dates [x] Check! One less thing on my growing to-do list.