This is where I tell you all about planning my own wedding. After all, if I'm publishing all these Real Weddings, it's only fair I share my trials and tribulations. Read the rest of my wedding diary here.
My plan for our Save the Dates was a disaster. If you check out my last posting, you'll see that I'd decided to use wooden cards (see below) with the symbol of a key stamped on one side, and the Save the Date message stamped on the other. Unfortunately it really didn't look good. The font of the message stamp is light and feminine, and the key stamp is really heavy and clunky, and they clashed horribly. It wouldn't have been that much of a disaster, but in my enthusiasm, I'd already stamped all the wooden cards with the key, meaning I couldn't use them any more. If you're planning your own DIY invitations, I'd definitely recommend creating one template, to check out the finished effect, before you go stamping crazy.
Several weeks then passed where I tried to figure out what to do, and meanwhile the clock was ticking, because we were going away for August, and I wanted to get the Save the Dates out before we left. In the end, I decided to save the wooden cards for the reception, and use white luggage tags instead. By now, I'd left it too late to buy the perfect sized tags from Etsy, so I had to buy regular ones and chop the ends off them. As you can see, my scissor-skills leave something to be desired, so the edge wasn't entirely straight, but hopefully my guest won't notice!
Our flight left on Tuesday evening, and I decided to buy the luggage tags and start stamping on Tuesday morning! So it was a bit of a lastminute affair, but The Boy chipped in, and within a couple of hours, we'd managed to stamp and put together 100 or so Save the Dates, and carefully put them in the envelopes. We took them with us to the airport, with the plan of posting them just before we got on the flight. I'd decided on gold 1st class stamps for the look, but because of the pegs, they were too fat for a standard stamp, and needed more postage. So we ended up sticking on over 200 stamps with only half an hour to go before our flight took off. Tense wasn't the word!
The whole experience was good fun, but I'm not sure I'll DIY our actual wedding invitations. Despite all the impressive efforts of other DIY brides, I'm thinking they must have more raw talent than me, and I'd really like our invitations to look more professional. Although I will go on with my DIY attempts in the hope that I get a bit better! By the way - I'm always hugely inspired by the blog I Do It Yourself - definitely worth a look!
