Well That's Settled!

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Thank you to all of you who comment on my post about invitation wording! You were a great help! :)

So to update you all, I decided to stick with the following (which is what I had originally):
on Saturday, the first of May
two thousand and ten
at three o'clock in the afternoon

As for the wedding website address...I nixed it. Not only would it have been impossible to fit on the invitation but it just wouldn't have looked right! As Ready to be Mrs. B! suggested, I'm going to see about fitting it on the accommodations card that will go in with the invitation. I know it isn't necessary but I'm a little concerned. Our save-the-dates will be electronic and not paper so the e-mails could easily get deleted and the information would then be lost.

I was able to include that saying I loved on our invitations. The FI loved it, just as I thought it would! I'm so happy with how the wording, format and look has turned out!

Here's a tiny little sneak peak of the wording. The big reveal won't come until after the invitations have been received by guests so this will have to tide you over until then....

(Source: yours truly)

The above graces the top of our invitations! The font we chose is called "Adine Kirnberg Script" and I downloaded it from dafont.com.

We had the font choices narrowed down to three options; Adine, Brock Script and Edwardian Script. We liked all three but Adine looked the best with our invitations. Brock and Edwardian both looked too "thick" and "heavy". Thankfully the FI picked Adine as his favorite before I told him it was my favorite and what we'd need to go with because of layout and space reasons! :D

Now it's time to play with the reply card layout and mess around with the accommodation/direction insert.

Help!!!!

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Ok ladies, I need your assistance please! I'm working on the layout for our invitations and I've almost got it figured out...I think.

However I need help with something. Is it ok to put our wedding website link on our invitations? I was originally planning on including it. But because of the shape of our invitations, it's proving to be hard to include it because it's so long. And then I got to thinking that I don't know if I've ever seen them on invitations to begin with!

I'll certainly be putting the website link on our e-mail save-the-dates. Is that enough? So what do you think...include the link on the invites or no?

Also when it comes to the date and time I need opinions on how I should word that part:
1) on Saturday, the first of May
two thousand ten
at three o'clock in the afternoon
or
2) Saturday, the first of May
two thousand ten
three o'clock in the afternoon

Let me know what you think is best for each question! Thanks! :D

Save-the-Dates

I absolutely REFUSE to call them STD's. I just can't do it. lol

Our save-the-dates will be sent out via e-mails. Why? First and foremost, budget limitations. I just simply cannot afford to create paper save-the-dates and then spend all that $$$ on postage for them. Most everyone that we will be inviting to the wedding has an e-mail address and uses it frequently so e-mail is the way to go for us!

I realize that our wedding is still 11 months out and it may seem a little early to be sending out a save-the-date e-mail. However my family (close and extended) and close friends that will be invited will have to travel to the wedding. They also have very busy schedules and plan out as far as a year in advance! So...in our case, we need to get these babies out as soon as we can!!

So yesterday I sat down and started designing some save-the-date graphics that we can put in the e-mails to get the word out. Just like with my Flickr Cards, I had no vision or ideas for the design of the graphic. I just set to work and let my creative juices flow and these are the options I ended up with:

(Source: yours truly)

I created these graphics from scratch, no part of them was taken from anyone else or any other image. As you can probably tell, the top designs were my first attempts and as you work your way down, my last. I would love to be able to wait to send these puppies out until after we have an engagement photo session and get the pictures back, but there's no way I can hold off. So, I rummaged through my pictures of the two of us and found two of my favorite images (and also realized we need more pictures of us together). I still have to show these images to Charles (doing that tonight) so that I can get his input on them since his mug is on them too! But before consulting with him #5 is my absolute favorite! We're dressed up a little more in this picture and the day it was taken was fantastic! Back in October, Charles took me on a train ride on the Great Smoky Mountain Railroad. I'd never been on a train before and it was so awesome!

If you enlarge the picture, you'll be able to see the design elements better. If you notice our wedding website address feel free to check it out. I'll blog about it soon but it's not done and I was waiting to blog it until it's complete. Which save-the-date design do you like best?

Are you sending out your save-the-dates via e-mail or snail mail?

Priceless Photos

I love the new idea of Flickr photo sharing cards! I first stumbled across the concept over at www.weddingbee.com. Miss Candy Corn, Miss Cream Puff, Miss Lemon, Miss Penguin and so many others created Flickr accounts and photo reminder cards so their guests could share their pictures with them after the wedding! How awesome is that!?

As a photography lover, I want to be able to see the photos that our guests are able to capture at the wedding. They are scattered in many different locations and can capture different angles, scenes and moments that our photographer won't be able to get; because lets face it, they can't be in every single place...as much as I wish they could be. ;)

Back at the beginning of the month I sat down and designed our Flickr cards from scratch. Because I'm poor and can't afford Photoshop, I used PowerPoint. I have discovered that working in PP on a Mac opens up a lot more editing options than you have when working with it in Windows. Here's what I came up with, the first image is the front of the card and the second is the back. Remember you can view the images larger by clicking on them.

(Source: yours truly)

(Source: yours truly)

When I sat down to design the cards, I had no vision as to what I wanted them to look like. I was just going to play around a bit, maybe come up with a few different options and see which one I liked most. This was my first and only design and I just love how it came out!

The tree design came from the kiss the groom. They have this thing called The Kissing Tree...you should really go check it out! It's a generator that places your text in the heart on the tree. So cool! I found it on another brides blog a while back but I can't remember which one, I loved it instantly and made a lot of trees.

For the Flickr card though I had to use a photo editing program to erase what the kissing tree placed inside the heart. The text I wanted there wouldn't fit using their site so I did it myself. It's kind of hard to read in the image but in the tree it says "Kristal & Charles May 1, 2010". And the top quote says "A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense, and is, thereby a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety. ~ Ansel Adams" I've seen lots of flickr cards with the popular quote "A picture is worth a thousand words" but I wanted something different...hence the Ansel Adams quote.

I'm still undecided about how I'll get the cards to my guests and if I'll embellish them with any purple ribbon but I have time to figure those things out. If you have suggestions though let me know!

What do you think of my card design? Have you created a DIY project with no vision in mind and totally fell in love with your first attempt?