After Cotton Dude and I got engaged and decided we were going to get married in Italy, I knew I would need to send something out to let our friends and family know that they may want to begin to save their money and their vacation days for our wedding…of course this meant Save the Dates!

Image from magnetstreet.com

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Since we’re having a destination wedding, one of the first things on the list of things to do was to send out Save the Dates to our guest list. I wanted this to be a relatively simple project. Though I love the look of magnets and more complex Save the Date packages, keeping costs down and stress levels low took precedence. We decided to plan an engagement photo session with the intent of using the results for Save the Date postcards, wedding website and possibly our guest book at the wedding itself.

Photo by F22studio

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Save-the-Dates are just one more extra expense that is unnecessary when you are planning a wedding on a budget…unless you are having your wedding out of town.  Which is our case.

My idea was to send out vintage style “Greetings from California” postcards.  I had seen this done before with other cities and states, and loved it!  But inside the letters CALIFORNIA, I want pictures of us and the city we are getting married in.  I figured I could use some of our engagement photos too.

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Honeysuckle Dude and I are both English teachers, so our wedding planning naturally took a turn for the literary. Our save-the-dates would not be simply magnets or cards. We sent our guests save the date bookmarks! I don’t think sending Save the Dates improved the attendance of out of town guests for our wedding, but they did give a preview for the day. We incorporated the colors and design on other DIY elements.

I picked up the basic supplies from Michaels and Target: plain bookmarks and scrapbooking paper in our wedding colors (totalling less than $12). Then, I designed business cards on Vistaprint (same company Lily Bud used). The template made customizing the business card easy peasy. I changed all the contact info to our wording:

A lot of my fellow brides to be have asked me if I was going to do Save the Dates. I really didn’t want any extra costs, but then I love doing anything wedding related so I decided to go ahead and make mine. Of course, I wanted to make sure it set the tone for the wedding and not be a complete hack job and look like it was nicely done. However, since I knew my invitations would be more formal in nature and I’m not exactly Ms. Formal all the time, I decided to go the fun route with our Save the Dates.

Searching around, I found that you can actually get things printed pretty cheap.  In fact FOR FREE! Yes, I know..there must be a catch. There kind of is, but it’s not too bad.  With VistaPrint, you can get a lot of items for “free” as long as you pay and art charge and the shipping fees. Both are very nominal and I managed to get 100 Save the Date postcards AND magnets for under $30 bucks!!! SAVE SAVE SAVE!

Here’s what I did…

I go my very very talented bridesmaid to help me with some graphics. I knew I wanted magnets, so first I got those designed. Here it is!

However, the ones that were “Free” are small and I thought it would be a little weird to just mail them.  Therefore, to my delight, I noticed that Vista print was also offering free postcards. Therefore, I decided to have a nicely designed postcard with a placeholder for the magnet. This was the result:

I used some double sided tape to put the magnet on in the dark blue area where the dogs are so that it could easily be removed and not destroy the postcard.  And there you go…100 Save the Dates for “free!”.

Since MOST invitations are formal…I really suggest you have fun with your Save the Dates. They aren’t a must, but if you are expecting out of town guests or just in a crafy mood…go for it!

We’re in the middle of designing (with the help of a graphic designer friend) our Save the Date post cards. When we got engaged, I read all of the “rules” on save the dates, i.e. originally intended for destination weddings, to be sent out 6 months in advance. We’re not exactly having a destination wedding (we live in NYC, and are getting married in Madison, WI—and I wouldn’t call Wisconsin in October a destination…) but since many of our friends and family would be traveling, we decided that we were going to “Save the Date”.
Part of me didn’t want to waste the paper, because this is the first thing, in what I perceive to be a waste of resources for wedding planning. I wanted to email it out. But, then I found Greener Printers.

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