Save the date

I’m often caught criticising the Royal Mail and their shoddy delivery services in North London, but it seems posting the ‘Save the Date’/’Reserver Dagen’ cards second class from Bethnal Green on Friday has paid off. Turns out my Mum and Dad received their postcard on Saturday, a whole 20 hours after it was posted. And the Danes received their cards today. Top marks Royal Mail. So I’m guessing I’m safe enough posting this blog post as most people should have received their cards by now.

Now I know I’ve banged on about not doing our wedding the way the British wedding culture seems to be set on us doing it, but I had to send ‘Save the Date’ cards, even if we had already text most people to tell them, to make sure that people who had to travel would know the date and could view our official wedding website for travel and hotel details.

When Jeffrey and I got engaged my sister Lisa suggested we have our own special font for all our wedding stationery needs. Lisa’s naturally creative (check out her craft blog) and wanted to get in to drawing fonts. She saw this as the perfect opportunity, so away she went. Here’s her first take which I then traced, scanned and altered in Adobe Illustrator thanks to some expert help from my workmate Lucia, and a three hour download time of Adobe’s CS5 suite trial with photos and songs being wiped off my laptop to make space.

I then had to have a crash course in Adobe In-Design, again courtesy of Lucia, so that I could make the font into save the date cards. Once the letters were in place Jeffrey and I played about with colours in Photoshop. Now, I understand that making your save the date cards is the time when you should be choosing your ‘theme’ and making sure these reflect that. Or, as I mentioned in an earlier post, if you’re um-ing and ah-ing about your colour theme you should opt for “neutral shades of ivory, silver or gold and then you can add splashes of colour later on with the table stationery. That way you can relax knowing that the important invites are posted before deciding on the colours for your big day”.

Well, we don’t really have a wedding theme, though I guess if we were to theme, as I’ve said before, “it would be ‘us’” – so I guess that means creative/British/Ghanaian/Danish. So it also means colour, amongst other things. Therefore we went a little bit crazy with the colours on the Save the Date cards (see below) and made the following, with printing courtesy of moo. Et voila, Save the Date cards are done. Next up, invitations. I just hope this time it doesn’t take me 4 nights work.