Wedding Wednesdays Vol. 3: Save the Dates

(Originally posted 1.25.11)  

So months weeks before Keegan proposed, I was Stumbling (using StumbleUpon) wedding ideas and I stumbled save the dates that looked like film strips from photobooths ala here. Automatically, I knew that I had to use that style as my own save the dates. I wanted to use a prop of some sort to write "save" "the date" and the actual numerical date on. We found a small white board at WalMart and found our photographer in my good friend from back home, Kelly. After Kelly did the rest of our engagement photos, we told her what we wanted for our save the dates. Kelly, being the artsy person she is, wrote the message for us in her awesome handwriting and took the photos against a brick background so that it was somewhat neutral, but still made our green shirts pop out. 

After we got our pictures back from Kelly, I set about making our save the dates. Wait what? Yes, I made our save the dates myself. Both to save on money and to make sure that I got exactly what I wanted (and I'm going to do the same with our invitations, but that's a different post all together.) We figured out that it would be cheaper to print three of the STDs (hehehe yes, I'm secretly a child,) on an 8"x10" print from WalMart and cut them ourselves. We had to figure out the dimensions of each one and then it was basically a plug and play. Put in the pictures, make sure they're evenly spaced, add some text and.....

voilà! 

One save the date. In my opinion, it doesn't look exactly like it came out of a photobooth, mostly because you can tell that we're outside, but I'm ok with that. I love how they turned out, and we've gotten really good responses so far. 

I really wanted the STDs to be magnets so people could put them on their refrigerators and not forget about us in the months before we sent out our invitations, so I bought a few rolls of magnet tape from Hobby Lobby (one of my favorite places in the world.) It was like $1 each and I cut it into 1 inch squares. I put a square into each of the top corners and one in the middle of the bottom side so that it wouldn't flop around. 

And voilà, one magnet save the date.  

Easy, cheap, and if I wasn't trying to do it all over Christmas, I probably could have had them done in a weekend. 

Cost breakdown (as best as I can): 

Photos: We paid $250 for all of our engagement pictures including the ones for our STDs

Printing the STDs: $96 at WalMart for ~105 individual STDs

Magnets: $7 (We got 7 rolls which were $1 each)

Envelopes: $5 for 100 envelopes, just the right amount

Stamps: $44 for 100 stamps 

If you do the math, not including the cost of the taking the engagement pictures, each STD cost us approximately $1.42, I'll even round to $1.50. Not bad if I do say so myself.