Save the dates. Are they worth it? I definitely asked myself that as I was hand writing over 100 addresses the other night. Let's talk about it.
The first thing about save the dates is deciding if you even want to do them. They're like a pre-announcement sent out 6-8 months before your date, helpful if you have a lot of older or out of town guests. It's really dependent on if your guest list knows how to work a computer without assistance. If it's iffy, I'd say go ahead and do them. I'll give you a few tips to hopefully save some $$$ while you're at it.
If you don't know about Canva yet, you're about to meet the next best thing since the Cricut was invented. (Not that I have one - I haven't achieved that level of DIY quite yet) But Canva is this amazing website for those of us who don't know the first thing about Photoshop. It's a really user-friendly way for making invitations, signage, menus, and *ahem* save the dates. This is a work-around for using the templates on websites like Minted or Zola. There are a ton of free templates on Canva and they are pretty customizable as well. Below is a screenshot of what it looked like when I was working on my save the dates. I got some inspiration for font choices but all of the flowers I picked were added by me!
A note about Canva - there is a free version and a professional version which is like $50/year. Obviously I have the professional version because I use it for our social media but I think it'd be worth the investment regardless because then you get access to everything on the site. It's doable to make pretty invites without the premium version though so I get it if you need to save pennies anywhere you can.
Once you've created your invitation and you're happy with them, you'll need to decide where to print them! I struggled a bit with this because I needed to upload my own image and a lot of sites make you use their templates, but I was able to work around it. I ended up going with Costco because you can upload your own image, they have a very high quality card stock, and it ended up being $94 for 150 cards (with 80 lb. envelopes that they would print my return address on). I picked the rounded edge and they shipped to my house for free!
Let me walk you through it quickly - go to Costco's website (you will need a Costco photo center membership at the minimum - but who doesn't know at least one person that has a Costco membership right?), click on 'photo', then 'cards', then the premium stationary option ($16.49 for 25), then up at the top right click 'your design'. I chose the 5x7 single-sided option and I think it worked great! After that you just need to add your design and it's pretty explanatory from there.
Remember, you only need enough invitations for the individual addresses. I forgot to count the actual addresses and ended up with extra save the dates I have no idea what to do with. I'll let you know if I figure something out.
After that, it's just a matter of getting the addresses (I got my family, Corban got his and we put it all in a big google sheet) and either printing them or writing them - I wrote them because our printer can be finnicky. USPS has some really pretty stamps usually and I just loved these forever stamps with the flowers on them. We got 200 for $116 so we can do our invitations with the same stamps.
Once my out of town guests receive these, I'll likely start calling them to see if they will actually be able to come so I can get an idea of how many of my B List I can invite.
That's all the advice I have for Save the Dates; I hope this helps!
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