STD's are being spread

Sorry for that.  Couldn't help yet another STD joke. 

You may recall our hunt for the perfect STD and my poll of the audience to help us choose the perfect photo.  Well we ordered them, they came in, I taught myself calligraphy and addressed them, and yesterday they went out the door. 

So now that they are out the door on their way to our guests, I think I can safely show you what we decided to do.  Armed with our livingsocial deal for vistaprint, we ordered our save-the-date magnets.  Here's what they looked like, with last names removed to protect the innocent :).   

They look even better in person and they turned out really well!  I love the photo we chose to put on them and the design is perfect.  What do you think?

DIY Calligraphy: The Result

This whole calligraphy thing seemed a bit daunting to me.  In true form, Mamabean told me I should just hire someone.  She's of the opinion that if there's someone out there who gets paid to do something, you shouldn't do it yourself.  That's all fine and dandy for her and all.  But reality check:  we're on a budget!  And as I've said, people are just going to throw these envelopes away.  So, DIY it is.

I started off with the essentials.  My fountain pen with additional nibs, some plain paper, a pencil, ruler, and a good eraser.  

Then I started attempting Italics.  My pen set came with a few different ink colors so I started playing with red, since I thought I wouldn't use it on the actual envelopes.  My attempts looked a little something like this:

 And this...

Oh yes, and this:  



Watch out!  I'm getting fancy here.

So after practicing for awhile, I thought I could start tackling some plain white envelopes.  I don't have photos to show you, but let's just say that I went through quite a few before I was ready to start on the nice envelopes that matched our STD's. 

After what felt like a really long time and a lot of practicing, I finally started on my first envelope.  I started off by drawing lines on the envelope in pencil.  I did 7 lines starting 1 1/2 inches down from the top.  The lines were 3/16 of an inch apart, since I was using a fine fountain pen.  This distance changes based on the type of nib you choose. 

The 3/16 inch distance is basically to determine how large your lowercase letters are.  Letters like a, c, m, n, s all should fit in that space.  Letters like b, d, and p will have their "tails" above or below this line.  Uppercase letters end up taking up almost 6/16 inch, so two spaces. 

After drawing my lines lightly, I slowly started on my first envelope.  And I think it turned out pretty good!  After erasing the lines, the envelope looks like this. What do you think?

Could be better, but not bad for my first attempt! 

Since then I've done about 50 envelopes and let me tell you, my hand is hurting!  Each envelope takes a lot of time, a steady hand and lots of patience.  But after awhile, here's where I am.  I'm still learning, but I think I'm getting better!

What do you think??  Are you ready to tackle your own DIY calligraphy now?  

Vistaprint Frustrations

Unlike a lot of the creative women out there, we decided to order our STD's instead of DIYing, which is totally fine with us.  A few months ago, livingsocial.com had this great deal for vistaprint, which we jumped on immediately.  $10 for $50 worth of printed products at vistaprint.com, before shipping or taxes.  Fantastic deal!  So we each purchased one of these deals with the intention to use them for our save-the-dates.

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Fast forward to tonight.  We curled up on my couch with laptop in hand and designed our save-the-dates.  We used one of the many gorgeous photos taken by our amazing photographer and were ready to order.  Unfortunately, we had to split the purchase into two transactions in order to use both of our coupons.  It took a lot of math and playing with the numbers to figure out the best way to do this because if we spent over our coupon by $25, we got free shipping.  So we finally figured out how we needed to split it and put in the first order.  After the order was placed, a box popped up to order more STD's.  I clicked on the order button without reading the fine print, and quickly discovered that they simply added the 50 STD's to my order, rather than putting them in a separate transaction.  Needless to say, this totally screwed my entire plan.

So I went in and tried to change my order to take off the extra STD's.  Clicking through the FAQ's on the Help section lead me to a very unhelpful paragraph telling me that you cannot change orders, just cancel.  This was getting ridiculous so I decided to call them.  Unfortunately for us, they were closed.  So at this point, I decided to cancel my order placed less than 10 minutes prior and just restart the whole process.

After I clicked on cancel my order, I was told that my order could not be cancelled because it was already processed.  How convenient.  I find it amazing that they could process my payment without actually being open for business.  So, at this point, I just ordered the rest of what I needed and said screw it.  It just wasn't worth the hassle.  But the fiance plans on making a call tomorrow because this was just ridiculous.  And honestly, if anything, we should get the free shipping on the first order where I accidentally ordered 50 extra save-the-dates. 

They sure don't make it easy, do they?  What about you all?  Did you have any frustrations in dealing with vendors or companies?

Save-the-Dates

Oh the STD's, gotta love the inappropriate acronym.  K and I have discussed these for awhile and have found quite a few that we like.  We've been on the fence about doing a photo or non-photo STD.  We finally booked our photographer (yay!) and are planning on doing an engagement session with him, since it's included in our package.  If you're wondering who we chose, if you guessed Christopher Helm, then you are the proud owner of these shiny new..

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bragging rights.  Yes, I know.  I'm so generous! 

We absolutely LOVED Chris when we met him and loved his work.  I'm super excited to see how the photos turn out for both the engagement session and the wedding.  Just take a look at his website!  Anyway, enough gushing about Chris, back to the topic at hand, our STD's!  (hee hee) 

We decided that we really wanted to go with magnet Save-the-Dates because they're just super cute and really convenient to just stick them on your fridge.  There are a lot of sites out there that sell these magnets at reasonable prices.  My personal favorite that I've found is http://www.magnetstreet.com/.  I've heard good things about http://www.vistaprint.com/ but I just haven't found a lot there that I've liked. But here are some of the non-photo STD's we really like from magnetstreet.  

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I should also probably mention that we can change the color scheme on any of these.  I'm not a fan of the yellow-orange background in the second STD, but I love the tree.  Since our wedding is in October, I think it goes so well for the fall. 

I have to admit, these next few were never serious contenders, but they're just too funny to not share with you all. 

And my personal favorite: 

Gotta love the sense of humor.  But seriously, some of the others I actually liked are:

I love the idea that we're "counting down" the days until we get married.  Because, we are!  I can't wait to marry my best friend.  October can't come soon enough.  (275 days!)



I just really like the font in this one and the background.  It's so pretty! 

I also don't think we would have actually done the love birds, but I just think it's so cute I had to share. 

We have since decided to wait until our engagement session to send out STD's so we can include some of the pictures of the two of us in the Save-the-Date.  They're so much fun and I like that we'd actually get some use out of the pictures.  See what I mean? 

Super cute.  Not sure that this will be the one we use, but you get the idea.  What do you think??  Do you like the photo or non-photo save the dates better?