My favorite part of wedding planning is the correspondence. I've always enjoyed paper, handwriting and graphic design and making our own save the dates was important to me. I wanted the save the date to feel autumn-like but I also wanted it to be a poignant snapshot into Matt's and my life. At Cibu Jenny's suggestion I changed the title from "Save the Date" to "Savor the Days."
First I scanned the pictures and mementos. In Photoshop, I created the black "filmstrip" using the rectangular shape tool. Using the crop tool, I cut 1 inch boxes and sized the images to fit inside the boxes.The autumn leaves background layer was an old photo I took in Georgetown. The "Proof" stamp layer was lifted from a elementray school picture proof.
For the the bulletin-board feel postcard back side I scanned real leaves collected on our first trip to Ash Lawn and the ticket stub from our first kiss football game. For the "stamp" I used a vintage postcard of Ash Lawn I found on
Etsy. The other elements (pointing finger, circle) are standard Photoshop "shapes" found in the custom shape tool.
I uploaded all the graphics on
Vistaprint and created100 postcards, color front and back; 100 magnets and 200 envelopes with return address printed on back flap. Including priority shipping the entire cost came to $177.
To format and print the addresses on the envelopes, I used the Letters and Mailing tool in Microsoft Word. The cursive font is "Jefferson," downloaded free from
http://www.1001freefonts.com/. The block font is Trajan, the Cibu font.
The postage was another fun part. I love the idea of combining different vintage US stamps to equal .42 but
unused vintage US postage is not that easy to find. I was able to purchase a sheet of .22 1987 American Wildlife stamps on Ebay and combined those with current .10 and .05 stamps to create the scrapbook effect.
Just in case you were wondering how "Savor the Days" was made.
