DIY Save the Dates

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In case I haven’t mentioned this before, not only is my fiancé the most handsome guy in the world, he also happens to be a super stylish graphic designer. 

Therefore, he is designing everything we need for the wedding (invites, programs, escort cards, etc.).  It’s been the most fun/horrible experience ever.  He wants everything to be so perfect that he is having a hard time getting it going and I’m in the awkward position of either not saying enough so that I don’t hurt his feelings or giving too much of my opinion like I would if he were someone I had hired.

Everything that has been done so far has turned out beautifully so thank you, Bryce, you’re amazing.

Our Save-the-Dates were the beginning of this process and they took us months to figure out.  One day, while coming up with ideas, Bryce said: What if we do a print of the Iron Horse Hotel on our save-the-dates? Um, heck yeah!

The Iron Horse is the hotel where we are having our ceremony and reception. It’s a beautiful renovated warehouse and the outside of the building reminded us of some old Milwaukee advertisements we had picked up for another part of the wedding.  The inspiration all came from there so we contacted our incredibly talented friend, Jenie Gao, and commissioned her to do a cherry wood block carving of the Iron Horse that we could then print on the back of each card.

Once she was done with the carving we spent a day at the print studio getting them all done. It was a completely fascinating experience.  Jenie was an old pro, Bryce had done some of this in college, and I was a frightened newbie.  It was an exciting day, but by the end I was freezing cold and tired and those crazy kids wanted to keep printing for the fun of it!  It was pretty adorable to see them so pumped up, but we had plans with my bestie for dinner and I was afraid my feet would freeze off before we could get there.

The print studio.

Jenie the Pro

Before we had our wood block print day, Bryce had printed the actual save the date information on the front of our card and when he brought them home I had a mild freak out. I worried they were too plain and all we had to send people were these plain white cards with text on them.  We had wanted to do something exciting and creative!  I knew that we would be doing the Iron Horse print, but we had no color or dimension so we headed over to one of my favorite places, Broadway Paper.  It’s an amazing store in Milwaukee’s third ward.  We ordered our small antique gold envelopes and bought some textured black string.

Our logo on the front of the card.

Once our envelopes came in, Bryce printed up some little cards explaining the Iron Horse print (I mean our guests had to know just how cool it was!) and we stuffed those inside the gold envelopes.  

When our prints were finished I wrapped everything together with the string and sent them on their way!

Since I’m a bit of a control freak, I had already addressed all of the white envelopes with some gold markers a month in advance.  Luckily, I have pretty good handwriting so for a couple of weeks I practiced how I wanted to write out names and addresses and made a template to put inside the envelope for straight lines.  50 envelopes and 1,000 dead brain cells later (those were some smelly markers) the envelopes were done.

Totally made-up names and address. Wouldn't it be weird if they actually exist?!

I think that everything went together very well.  In the end it probably looks a lot less complicated than it actually was to make, but the guests seem to like them so it was worth it. Hopefully they enjoy that each save the date is a little piece of artwork that they can have in their home.  I sure like ours!

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