Front
Back. Check out the hot smudging action!
Beautiful and fabulous, are they not? Best of all, they were 100% made by me, like all of our other paper products will be. Not necessarily because it's a money saver, but because a) I like a creative challenge and b) I am super possessive over stuff.
These took a couple of hours to make, from beginning the design process to printing them all out.
Tools:
PaperSource Gravel Postcards (bought at the store. I can't seem to find them on the website)
GIMP
Fun fonts (I used MammaGamma and Freebooter Script from DaFont.
Ink Jet printer (I have my trusty HP PSC 1210v all in one printer that my roommates and I bought freshmen year of college. It's still chugging along 5 years later!)
Billy's and my philosophy for our wedding is that we want it to be elegant and beautiful but fun, so my first priority in designing the save the date cards was to embody that philosophy somehow, as well as introduce our movie theme in a classy but fun way.
So eventually I decided on filling the front of the card with famous movie couples.
The first test I saved. Here I was playing with using the full names of the characters, which got a little complicated as some characters either didn't have last names (Riff Raff & Magenta) or weren't really known by their full names (Hoban Washburn? Please, he's Wash!)
I drop the last name idea and add Billy and myself to the front of the card. It still looks weird though, with "Will" trailing onto the last line)
And finally, I sat down and really focused on spacing everything evenly and formatting everything perfectly so that Billy and I got a line all to ourselves. I also added the border (found on Google image search...sorry I didn't save the original source!) to give it a "finished" look.
Now for something that's 98% text, why did I choose to use an image editor rather than typing it up in Word? Simply, using GIMP gave me much more control over placement of the words. The script font is relatively huge, and with the ampersands Word wanted to leave huge gaps between the ampersand and the next word. It looked ugly. GIMP let me make the ampersands a different layer than the names so I could arrange everything in a way that looked natural. It also let me decide how much space should be between the lines and rearrange everything fairly easily to make sure I didn't have names layering on top of each other and obscuring things like the dot of an "i."
Of course, in order to have this flexibility, every. single. word was a different layer. That meant that when I wanted to move one thing, at least three other layers had to be moved with it. It was a tedious process, but I really think it was worth it.
Price breakdown:
2 packs of Paper Source postcards: Approximately $6 for 100 cards total (I can't find my receipt :-( so I don't know the exact price, but I think this was about right), or approximately 17 cents per card.
90 post card stamps at 27 cents each (10 cards were sacrificed to figuring out how to print these things, so I didn't need as many stamps as I had printed cards.
Total cost per save the date card: 44 cents
That's it. No ink costs because I didn't have to buy a new cartridge, obviously I didn't have to pay anyone to actually do the work. Just the paper and the postage.
This was definitely a huge money saver for us. Of course, we could have saved even MORE money by just forgoing the save the date cards entirely (they aren't exactly a wedding necessity!) but I had a few reasons for doing them, and sending them out 7 months before the wedding:
1)Most of our guests would, in fact, be traveling at least some distance in order to attend. This gives them a heads up before winter travel plans can be made that they have an invitation to come to Michigan during the winter and to take that into consideration.
2) Our wedding is the beginning of spring break for our friends who are still attending college. This tells them not to make plans for that first weekend unless they want me to hunt them down ;-)
3) (Discovered after the cards went out) It put us back in contact with some people we hadn't seen in awhile. For example, while I was in middle school and high school, I had two librarians who had an enormous impact on my life. However, as much as I had wanted to talk to them occasionally over the years, I had lost their e-mail addresses and it felt totally weird to call or write an old fashioned letter to these women for no reason other to chat. I mean, they were my teachers! But as I said, they were hugely influential in my life and I knew I wanted them to be invited to the wedding. By sending out the save the date card with our wedding website address (the website which has our e-mail addresses posted), both of my librarians have e-mailed me and we've had some casual e-mail conversations. It's fabulous!
4) It gave me something to do! This may have been the biggest reason. I was unemployed, and it's still a little too far out in the planning process to work on other major wedding projects. This let me do something productive and wedding related.
Are save the date cards for everybody? Nope. But while they are superfluous in the grand scheme of wedding planning, they sure were fun!
Are you doing save the date cards? Why? Have you had any unexpected surprises come from them?
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