Save the Dates: Revealed!

Ok, so the whole plan of getting the save-the-dates out before the holiday rush never ended up happening. While most of them were done in October, gathering all of the addresses and getting everything organized took longer than expected. We ended up giving most of them to my mom in January during the trip and she proceeded to mail them from Maine. We figured it would be much safer mail-wise to send them from within the States then to deal with the Korean postal service. God knows if they would have all made it halfway around the world!

So, now that the majority of them have been received, I can reveal them on this blog. Yay!

Here is a little step-by-step picture tutorial (just in case ANYONE out there is thinking of making their own STD and wanted to get a bit craftier than usual).

1. Buy card stock. We bought the blue color from an American company and had my mom ship it to us. Matt just so happened to find a huge pile of perfectly fine white card stock in his office at school that was collecting dust, so we scored there! Here is Matt cutting the white paper down to A4 size for for the printer.

 2. After printing out the text that was designed by our awesome friend Claire, we set up a work station that included everything we needed: blue paper, white paper (with the text printed from our HP printer at home), rules, the crane punches, etc.

3. After cutting the white paper and the blue paper down to the sizes we needed, the next step was to mark where we wanted the crane punches. This was probably the hardest part of the process. Good news is we're not complete perfectionists so as long as the three cranes were essentially lined up, we didn't care too much.

4. After using a ruler and making small marks, we went ahead and punched out the cranes using this super awesome punch we found at a craft store here in Korea. 

The blue crane is just a fluke from practicing with the blue paper. We only used the blue paper as a backing.

Here are 100 punched STD's awaiting the final touch, AKA: the picture!

5. After punching the cranes, we painstakingly marked four corners with a light pencil and used a box cutter to make 4 notches for the picture to slide into. This was Matt's idea, and while it was tedious, we love how the finished product came out. We were going to either print the picture using the ink from our printer (way too expensive and crappy quality), or just tape it on with no inserts. We love this idea better because it gives the photo a kind of 3D effect.

 6. After inserting the picture, we used double sided tape to tape the white peice of paper to the blue peice of paper and VOILA! Here is the finished product: our Save-the-Date.

Pretty sweet, eh? I would like to give all of the credit to Matt, because he was the one with the vision and planned out the entire look of it. Claire took our ideas and brought them to life, and we're SO pleased!

Now just wait until the invitations. These are going to BLOW YOUR MIND. haha, just kidding. But really, while it's a lot of work, making our own "suite" for the wedding has been so rewarding and has enabled us to get the exact feel we're going for.

We are starting to make the invitations next week because while we have 3 months until we have to mail them, it might take us that long to finish them. They also involve a lot of work!