Thursday, October 08, 2009

Please Don't Wait to Save the Date - Part 1

K & I decided to send Save the Dates to our out of town guestlist. We wanted to give them the opportunity to start making travel arrangements before we send out the invitations in February; we also didn't want to go crazy and spend more on paper & stamps & such than we absolutely had to. So, we figured that sending Save the Dates to only the people on our guest list who live out of town was a good compromise.

Our Save the Dates are completely self-made (which I'm very proud of). I used a free program I found called Inkscape to design the Save the Dates & I'm very happy with it. There was definitely a learning curve, but it does everything I need it to do and the price was right. :-)

Our design process went through a couple steps.  We iterated on one design until we found something that we both liked; I showed it to various people & we were ready to go.  Then, I said I felt like something was missing.  I didn't feel like it was as *good* as the Save the Dates I saw on the internet, nor did I feel like it represented us.  I don't have the original design with me, but I'll update the post later to include it.

So, I started searching around and trying to figure out what was missing from our Save the Date.  I found this invite and showed it to K:


We both really, really like it, and so I used it as an inspiration for ours.

I put together the basic layout and then I started looking for a quote to put at the top.  Except, to me this couldn't just be any quote - it is *the* quote. As I see it, this is the quote that sets the mood for our wedding. It's the first thing many people will see (this is before we'd finished our wedding website). I was looking for a quote that defined us & what we wanted our wedding to be.

Yes, that was a lot of pressure.

Yes, it's likely I was being overly dramatic & I could have put any quote and no one would really have noticed.

Anyway....one night K & I were talking about this. I figured out that in order to find a quote that defined our wedding, I needed to know what we wanted our wedding to be like. I asked him what he thought, and he said something along the lines of "I want it to be a celebration. I want to celebrate our love, family, and friends. I want it to be a lot of fun with a lot of laughter." He nailed it.  That's our wedding - that's us.  (By the way, have I mentioned lately how much I love this man? How many guys would respond with something like that?)

So, I decided to give up on quotes from famous people & use a quote from one of the key people involved in the wedding - K.  When I showed him the next design, with his quote at the top, I think we both knew this was it.  It was exactly the feel we were going for:

(picture by me)
Next post...assembly!

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