I can’t believe how quickly time is flying by… it’s hard to believe it is only 6 months or so until our wedding! Although we have booked most of the big parts (venue, photographer, DJ, dress etc), there’s still a million little things we need to get done!

I thought it would be neat to show off the little save-the-date cards we sent out just last week to all our guests. It’s part D-I-Y and part bought, but we really loved how they turned out!

I purchased a calligraphy pen to do dip pen calligraphy. It was a lot harder than I thought it would be… and very messy! We also only bought the exact number of envelopes needed (not a good idea!) so there was no room for error with the handwritten addresses.

I am actually really happy with how the calligraphy went. Although it wasn’t traditional formal calligraphy, I got the hang of dipping the pen in the ink, holding the pen properly, and learning how to regulate ink flow. In hindsight, it would have been easier to use a normal calligraphy pen, but I do like the effect the dip pen has.

I love LOVE LOVE the save-the-date cards we ordered from Night Owl Paper Goods. These beautiful wooden invitations are very “west coast”, but still elegant enough for a wedding. We designed the artwork, layout, and text ourself using Adobe Illustrator, and then had Night Owl print them on their high-quality very thin birch cards. Each one is unique with the wood grain and they are very sturdy while still being light. They also came with envelopes and are very good value. We LOVED them! You can see both their custom wooden wedding invitations and their ready-to-go wooden wedding suites here. Highly recommended!

I also did all the embossing and envelope decoration myself. Do-it-yourself embossing is time consuming but the final result is really cool! We cut a custom tree stamp into the correct size and shape.

Then you sprinkle embossing powder onto the clear stamped area, and then gently shake it off so that only the shape you want remains.

You then use a special heating tool to melt the powders which then gives a raised metallic sheen. Pretty!

On the back of the cards, we used a gorgeous custom made return address stamp that we purchased from Etsy from Paperfinger. Bryn creates your return address stamp using hand-drawn calligraphy. Each letter and stamp is unique (it’s not a font!)! We really loved it!

Last but not least, we attached a gold sticker seal to the back of each envelope and categorized them by country to get ready for mailing!

Wohooo! One hundred custom Save-the-Dates done! And it only took 20 straight hours of work

What do you think?

Tags: birch cards, calligraphy, cards, custom stamp, dip pen, DIY, do it yourself, embossed, embossing, handwriting, handwritten, Night Owl Paper Goods, Paperfinger, return address stamp, save the date, seal, wedding, wooden invitations

This entry was posted on Monday, February 14th, 2011 at 2:52 pm and is filed under Allie, Wedding/Relationship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.