Wedding Invitations: Save-the-Date Cards

First off, let me just say thank you for everyone’s feedback on our save-the-date cards, both through 5 Takes and in person. Everyone’s suggestions and constructive criticism were invaluable. A huge, huge thank-you to my friend Kristin, who designed not one but eventually about 10 save-the-date cards for us to choose from and even came up with the wording for it.

She sent us four options to start with, which were all so much better than anything we could have done ourselves. We liked one but weren’t a huge fan of the picture, so we went back and forth with different pictures, trying to incorporate a picture of Pittsburgh in it. For various reasons (one of them being we weren’t willing to pay $200 to use a professional photo of the skyline at night), that didn’t work.

So after all the back-and-forth, we ended up choosing the very first design she sent us. After some minor grammatical changes (I didn’t want any of my co-workers sending me feedback for a missing comma – come on, you know you totally would have), we had our winner.

Dana took them to Copies at Carson on the South Side on her lunch break to have them printed. They explained all of our different size and type of paper choices, and after a couple phone calls with me (I was at work), we choose our style.

Though they said it would take about 24 hours, they were wrong. It took about 3. She picked them up the next day, and that night, we stuffed them into our already-written Christmas cards we had prepared a few nights ago. I dropped them in the mail and we both hand-delivered some to our co-workers, and we were done. Bam! Save-the-date cards done!

The whole experience was pretty painless. I stand by the fact that Kristin did all of the work. Once we had the design, it was smooth sailing from then on. And I can’t say enough good things about Copies at Carson. There were no funny looks or weird questions from any of the employees over what was pretty obviously a same-sex wedding invite. (I realize Dana can be a male name, but they knew she was Dana, and I’ve never met any guys named Monica.) We were able to have 100 of them printed for under $40, and we didn’t have to spend anything extra on postage because they went out with cards we were sending out anyway.

After we had them printed, we thought maybe the writing at the bottom should have been a wee bit larger (we had them printed on 3×5 cards), but live and learn. They still turned out pretty great, I think. One thing down, a thousand forty-three to go!