Story of Us DIY Save the Date

We are waiting until spring to get our engagement photos, so I had to think outside of the photo postcard box.  Most of my friends getting married order their save the dates from a company like vistaprint.com.  I fell in love with this save the date by Bayside Bride and used it as my inspiration for designing my own save the date.  

Phil and I have been together for 8+ years, so we had a lot of little stories to tell.  This was our first big DIY project for our wedding, and we had fun designing it and making it our own.

The first step was really designing the text portion of the save the date.  Phil and I sat down one evening over a bottle of wine and wrote a list of all our fondest memories together.  We started dating in high school, went to college together, traveled, moved to DC, bought our first house together...we tried to capture all of these stories and more in our save the date.

We almost went out and bought a new version of Adobe Photoshop (so expensive!), but fortunately Phil's dad found us a free link.  Download Adobe CS2 for free here.  It took us some time to get the hang of it, but once we did it was really easy to use.

I download some adorable fonts for our save the date through Dafont.com.  There are a ton of free fonts, and there are so many cute ones.

We printed two per sheet of ivory cardstock paper to save trees and money.  You can do this by saving the image and creating a new document the size of your paper.  Add your image as a layer and duplicate it.  Make sure you save the image the size you would like to print it and with high pixels so it does not look fuzzy.

This Martha Stewart edge puncher made our save the date look a bit more professional.  It was easy to use, but punching out 100 sheets of cardstock took a long time.  It took me about 1-2 minutes per paper.  This was my TV watching activity for a week.

The method I used was to use the corner punch first and punch out all the corners then go back around and do all of the edges.  The tools is easy to use with it's built in alignment feature.  

Prior to assembling our save the dates, we cut out and gathered all of the items we needed.  My parents let us borrow their paper cutter, which made the process much easier.  I did not have to worry about cutting straight lines.

Save the date text sheet on ivory paper

Edge punched cardstock

Punched out hearts (I bought a punch for the heart and another mini hole punch)

Initial tags (printed with initials, punched with save lace detail as base, and punched using mini hole punch)

Rhinestones

Thin ribbon (sold at Jo-Ann Fabrics for 0.50 a roll)

It was nice having everything laid out so we could do an assembling line process to put all 100 invites together.

Spray adhesive was a great way for us to attach the ivory text cardstock to the neutral cardstock.  It looked very professional and clean.

A. Purchase a Spray Adhesive (I got mine from Hobby Lobby)

B. Layout ivory pieces and spray with adhesive(3 at a time seemed to work best)

C. Line up the ivory piece at the top

D. Continue to align all the way down

E. Press down with paper towel (it's important to press, not rub)

F. Let dry for about 30 minutes

Add all the pretty details.  String the heart and initial tags onto the ribbon and tie into a bow.  I found stringing them on the right hand side worked best in making sure it laid right.

I also added rhinestones onto the ring clipart that we found.  It dressed it up a bit, and made me smile.  I love all of the little touches. 

I am so happy with how they turned out and excited to send them out to our guests.  Now I need to start thinking about what to put together for our invitations.  What did you do for your save the dates?