nineseventeen: save-the-dates!

Greetings awesome blog readers!

After adjusting to life as a working girl, getting my butt kicked by my personal trainer a few times and celebrating my last birthday as an unmarried woman (!!!!) I'm back with all of the juicy details regarding our save-the-dates!

For those of you who have never heard of save-the-dates before, here's a brief description via the goddess of weddings (+ all things DIY) herself....Martha Stewart:

"Save-the-dates inform would-be guests of when and where the wedding will be. Though not required, they are helpful, particularly if many guests will have to travel to the wedding, if it will take place during a busy holiday weekend, or if accommodations nearby are scarce. Send save-the-date cards four to six months before the wedding, or even earlier if extensive travel plans must be arranged."

Soooo basically they're just pre-invites and when you really think about that, it's a pretty weird concept. I mean, why can't I just send out the actual invite early enough to allow people to make travel arrangements? Why should I invest time and money sending something that contains minimal information and then says "invitation to follow"? In the end, I decided Martha Stewart and 8 million other wedding magazines & wedding blogs couldn't be wrong and there must be a perfectly legitimate reason for sending save-the-dates instead of super early wedding invites. Also, as you all know, I like pretty things so convincing myself it was necessary to send save-the-dates took about 2.3 seconds once I started looking at all of the amazing options out there!

After much deliberation, zpao and I opted to go with a semi-custom design with the help of Hello!Lucky, a letterpress print shop/design studio in San Francisco. Ready-to-print designs weren't quite doing it for us while custom designs were out of our price range (turns out we have expensive taste in design...who knew?!) so the semi-customized option worked great for us. We were able to choose from previous custom designs and tailor it to look just the way we wanted. Yeah, Hello!Lucky is pretty cool like that (I'd highly recommend working with them...check out their website, they do the cutest/most creative greeting cards! http://www.hellolucky.com/)

Sooooo what does the final product look like? Well, I can't give away all of the details because we want it to be a surprise but I can tell you a few things:

1) it contains pictures of us (courtesy of my bridesmaid T!)
2) it features some of our wedding colors
3) we used this fabulous font that I fell in love with and just had to have: LiebeErika

While we wait for the save-the-dates to be printed we'll be adding to our ever-expanding address spreadsheet (this is zpao's job :P) and creating some snazzy wrap-around address labels to go on the envelopes (they were $2/address label with Hello!Lucky so we decided to get crafty and make our own!)

If all goes well (read: we actually get our act together in terms of addresses/labels) the save-the-dates should be sent out by the end of next week! Keep an eye on those mailboxes!

In the meantime, here are some save-the-dates that are pretty spiffy...