Save-the-Date Reveal!

We FINALLY mailed out our save-the-date cards and emailed our save-the-date email, so I can finally show you the finished products! If you remember, we won 50 free cards from Minted.com through a contest hosted by With This Ring. The process of customizing the card on the site was so easy and they shipped pretty quickly. When the cards arrived, they looked like this:

Gotta love cute packaging and the personalized sticker. Thanks, Robert! Ha. Here's how the cards turned out! I'm sorry I had to cover up our last names and stuff, but you get the gist. Isn't the scripty font dreamy?

Here it is, close up:

The original design on Minted incorporated the wedding date, but when we saw the proof that they emailed us before printing the cards, we decided we didn't like it. The 1s looked like Is, and ultimately we didn't feel it was necessary to have them. Here's what the proof looked like:

Luckily, Minted was awesome about customization and didn't have a problem removing the numbers. We're really happy with our final design and think the black-and-white photo and text make it contemporary and timeless. The paper is a recycled card stock, which looks and feels nice. We were able to use any photo we wanted (we close one of our Windau Photography engagement photos) and we were also able to customize the text and choose from several fonts. We ended up with a few extra cards so I'll definitely be including one with our other wedding mementos.

With the cards in hand, it was time to address and adorn the envelopes. I told you about our addressing options and showed you our supplies for sprucing up the plain, white envelopes. First, I used our customized address stamp (from Staples) on the back flaps:

Then I used one of the swirly stamps and cranberry ink I got from The Ink Pad in NYC to prettify the front of the envelopes:

After that, I used the "Let's Celebrate!" stamp on the bottom of the back flap. I figured that since I wasn't doing envelope liners, this would be a cute surprise for when our guests opened the envelopes. And the phrase is perfect for a wedding--I mean, it IS a celebration, right?

Speaking of celebrations, we tied in that theme with our stamps. Once I realized that the Zazzle stamps I liked were actually more expensive than your normal $.44 stamp, I nixed that idea and got these "celebrate" stamps instead:

I love that they add a little more color to our envelope, and set the tone of our wedding! Our save-the-date also has the word "celebration" in it so everything ties together nicely. Here's a full envelope shot:

And here is the card and envelope together. I didn't take a photo of my handwritten addresses, but my handwriting's not all that special so you can just imagine!

So that's it. I love the way the cards came out, and of course the fact that they were free! I did spend money on our address stamp, the decorative stamps and ink pads (besides the postage) but they were all worthy expenses. I'm sure I'll use the swirly stamps again--for escort cards, table numbers and/or our programs. I might even try to emboss next time!

Next, I'll show you our save-the-date email and some screen shots of our wedding website. I'm so glad this project is finally behind us and I can say this wedding feels a lot more real and less like this hypothetical thing now that our guests are in the loop!

*All images by me.