Hi! I'm Taryn, a writer, designer and soon-to-be-bride from Atlanta, Georgia. Sit a spell with me and catch up as I plan the wedding of my beer-loving, confetti-throwing dreams to the wonderful Mr. Williford.Save the Date: The Full Reveal
As a designer, I take a lot of pride in stationery and paper goods, so these save-the-dates—the first thing our guests would see—were the one thing about the wedding I was dying to get exactly right. Even though it took a long time to get our save-the-dates done, I absolutely love them! I tried to add lots of small details (which meant doing a lot of work) to really personalize them, and it makes me a little dizzy to think I’m soon going to do it all over again (and then some!) for our invitations.
- Spray-painted Gold-Edged Envelopes
- Custom Save-the-Date Stickers and Wrap-Around Labels
- Our Return Address Rubber Stamp
- Collecting Personal Vintage Postage Stamps
So, yeah. I may have put a little too much effort into our save-the-dates. But you know what? Our guests are loving them, if Facebook and Instagram are any indication.
Yes, I addressed my bridesmaid’s invite to her and Niall Horan of One Direction. Yes, we’re way too old for that. No, we don’t care.
It made my heart swell to see our friends sharing and saying such sweet things (and using our wedding hashtag!). It makes the work all worth it. And now that most of our friends and family have gotten our date announcements, I can finally share the whole thing here.
The full suite: Kraft paper envelopes with gold-edged flaps, adorned with custom wrap-around labels and our return address stamp. Inside the envelopes is a double-sided save-the-date card printed on thick layered Mohawk Superfine paper, plus a sheet of six stickers to mark the date.
The card itself is a really simple design without many frills. Just our names, wedding logo, the date and place and the url of our wedding website. For the back, I designed a geometric pattern in two of our primary wedding colors, green and black.
The card was printed on a Moo Luxe Notecard. It’s a super thick stock and feels really luxurious (especially for the price), like letterpress paper without the textured printing. I couldn’t get a good photo, but the Luxe cards come standard with a colored edge detail running through the center of the layered paper stock.
(FYI, the Luxe card stock is included in a free sample pack you can order from Moo, if you want to see and feel it for yourself. I ordered a lot of paper samples from many places to decide on this printer and stock.)
Moo’s Luxe Notecards come with white envelopes, but I really love the look of kraft paper (and plan to use it throughout the paper for the whole wedding), so I ordered an extra set of postcard envelopes from Moo that were spray-painted with metallic gold paint.
The stickers are from Moo, too. Their Stickerbooks come in books of 90—or 15 sheets of 6 stickers—and you can order as many different designs in your book as you’d like. I designed the stickers after the save-the-date card was done, grabbing elements from our logo, colors and the geometric pattern and combining them with some of our engagement photos (shot by the lovely Paige Jones).
We ordered several books and added one sheet to each of our save-the-dates, wrapping it all together with a bit of baker’s twine. Most guests got black twine, the guests towards the end of my tying and stuffing got red twine after I ran out of black. What are you gonna do?!
The vintage stamps pull the whole thing together, like icing on a cake. I tried to give each guest or family stamps that I thought they’d like. So my Florida family got the Florida gator stamps, and Roo’s buddies got a bunch of the sports-themed ones.
This save-the-date suite was definitely a labor of love, but I’m so happy with how they turned out! Now I just need to think about how I want to translate the look of our save-the-dates to our invitations. Ideally, I want our invitation suite to vary enough from our save-the-date suite to easily tell the difference, but still look like parts of a whole. At least, I think so. How closely do your invites match your save-the-dates?
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I don’t know if anybody cares to hear about the photo styling, but I used some of my favorite props in these photos: ribbon and twine, a little ampersand charm, a pair of gold-dipped playing cards from Anthropologie, a potted succulent from my living room, and a plastic toy animal from a 99¢ bin that was spray-painted gold. Basically, I just grabbed every pretty thing I could find nearby and arranged it for the photo. That’s how we do it in blogland.
