Save The Date

Even though in Germany couples do not really send out the Save The Date cards, I really like this custom. I thought it was especially suited to Marco's and my wedding, as we have so many friends and family living all over the world (in Canada, Germany, South Africa, Australia, and Switzerland). All these people had to book time off work and organize travel, so the idea of letting them know our wedding date as soon as possible was excellent. I had always wanted to design the wedding stationary myself, because I like a challenge, and I like saving money. So as soon as we knew that the registry office would be free on our chosen day, I got to making the first item of our wedding stationary. They were sent in February for our August wedding.

I researched Save The Date ideas for hours and also had to think about the colour scheme. Marco and I wanted it to be a fun, informal wedding, so I decided to go with an assortment of cheerful, bright, summery colours.

I also wanted the stationary to have a definite homemade feel, and to reflect my love for crafting. The craft that I consider "my craft" is cross stitching, so I wanted to incorporate that somehow. I found the perfect free font for this. It's called Home Sweet Home and can be downloaded free from dafont.com. It's the same font I am using for my blog header.

In Word, I designed the following template:

There were some websites that offered to print custom made fridge magnets, and I thought that was such a cute idea! Marco and I have a thing for fridge magnets, and I liked imagining our guests using one as a little reminder of things to come. I purchased printable magnetic sheets, and below is a little image of one of the finished magnets (apologies for the cat hair that got scanned along with it...). The magnetic sheets were very thin and light, and easy to cut. Again, I simply designed it with Word.

I then used a Fiskars 3-in-1 corner punch, to prettify the print outs and mounted them on postcard sized coloured cardboard. I fixed some photo corners around the heart in the middle to hold the little magnet in place. Here is the whole Save The Date assembled, in its German version:

For envelopes, I just used a lot of different coloured ones, reflecting the colours from the card. I wanted the envelopes to look quite pretty, so that people would be aware they were getting exciting mail right away. I printed address labels from a free template I found on Creature Comforts, and used a calligraphy pen to write the addresses. For stamps, I had found some unused vintage ones to buy at a slightly cheaper price than the stamps would have cost me at the post office.

Then I had a slight stroke of madness inspiration and decided to embroider a cross stitch heart on each of the 50+ flaps. I first tried to just embroider on unprepared paper, but discovered that the pressure of the needle going through the paper would make it look creased and untidy, and obviously my eye sight is not so precise that I would get even stitches.

So I had the idea of pre-punching the holes through the paper first, which worked a dream. For this, I printed out a template of the heart (to get a heart in Home Sweet Home, you use the * key).

I then placed the envelope on a self healing craft mat and punched the required holes through the template and the envelope.

After that, it was really easy to stitch the heart. I used differently coloured strands of Anchor floss, always to compliment the colour of the envelopes.

Here's it finished:

Then Marco and I stuffed all the envelopes and kissed them goodbye before we dropped them in the mailbox. It was a really happy feeling to post a stack of rainbow letters, knowing that this was kind of the seal on everything and made the beginning of the rest of our lives official.

My sources? eBay, eBay, eBay! I think I bought most of the tools and the material I used on eBay. It was always at a good price, and delivery was quick and smooth with all of the sellers I bought from. It's where I got the magnetic sheets, the card, the envelopes, the corner punch, the photo corners, the stamps, and the calligraphy pen. I just always make sure that sellers have a good feedback record!

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