Our Save the Date (Finally, I know!)

Here are my Save the Dates that I promised I'd show you probably two or three weeks ago now. I hope you like them as much as I love (and I mean LOVE) them.Ok, so here's how we (and by we, I really mean me) made them. I scoured high and low online to find the perfect inspiration. I knew I wanted to do a simple postcard that people could easily hang on their fridge to remember the date. My mom uses VistaPrint for her at-home business quite frequently so I knew I wanted to use them. They've got great prices that you just can't beat.

I wanted to incorporate both mine and my mister's personalities in the STD and immediately thought video games/xBox360. (I think my fiance has turned me in to a total geek...oh well.) Anyways, if you know anything about xBox, when you make a profile you get to create a cute little avatar to look like you. You can chose different outfits and everything! Fun!

So I signed on to each of our profiles and changed our outfits to more formal attire, him in a suit and me in a red dress (there are no wedding dress available on the xBox - rude!) So then I had to hunt down our avatars on the xBox website and save the images to my computer. Now, because I had to put mine in a red dress I had to load the image into Paint and change the red dress into a long white dress.

I then loaded both of our images into Powerpoint along with some text and the simple heart graphic. It came out great and I thought I was ready to upload it on to VistaPrint. That's where I hit my roadblock for this project. To upload your image into VistaPrint and actually get it to print out non-blurry it needs to be a certain quality.

Mom to the rescue. My mom does web design for a living so I sent the STD off to her to play around with until it would upload and print out clear for sure. She worked her magic right away so I could get the STDs ordered. VistaPrint has a handy dandy tool to create the back of the postcard right on their site so all I had to do was add text. Easy peasy!

You're probably wondering why in the heck I wanted to send my STDs out so early considering my wedding isn't until next October. Well, most of my guest list will be traveling from out of town and I wanted to give them time to save up for airfare and the hotel. If I were a guest I know I'd appreciate the early warning.

They arrived in a little over a week even though I chose the slowest shipping method which said it would take about 3 weeks to arrive. Yay for me! So I organized a little address party with my 2 co-MOHs and we banged them out in no time thanks to my address collecting form I created on Google Docs. (Thank you Weddingbee Bees!)


Here's a fun pic of me mailing them off the next day!


Did you send out STDs? Did yours turn out exactly like you dreamed?