♥ Wedding Save the Date Tips and Planning ♥
Creating your save the dates is a big step forward in your wedding planning. It is the first time you will have your wedding guest list in place and announcing to family and friends that the date is approaching. There are some people who say you don’t have to do save the dates for your wedding unless it is a destination wedding, but I highly disagree. If you are having a summer wedding, a wedding on a prime night of the year, a Saturday in the summer time, or if you have a lot of out of town guests, it’s a nice courtesy to let them all know ahead of time to mark your date on their calendar so that you don’t make any other plans. The save the dates are plain and simply: a note to say we really want you to set this day aside on your calendar for us, so that you can be there on our special day.
We ordered our Save the Dates from www.WeddingPaperDivas.com
Our save the date template style was called Pristine Heart – click here
In order to get ready for your save the dates, and all future invitation correspondence that will follow (bridal shower, wedding, thank you cards) you will need to have your guest list finalized. This took us awhile to do as it requires asking your friends for their addresses (much easier to do now a days with text messaging and social media), but you also have to ask your parents to gather their lists as well. Once you get everyone’s lists together, then you need put it all together in a document and start to figure out exactly how many invites will be going out and if you need to consolidate your lists.
Wedding Guestlist Template – click here to use the one I use
One piece of advice I have when ordering your save the dates (and I know it sounds like common sense, but I made the mistake myself) – only order for the # of couples, not the number of people. For example: in total we have 217 people who will be invited, but that means I only needed 107 actual save the dates. Silly me ordered 220 save the dates, so now I have a ton of left overs and about $200 lost, haha. It’s funny now but at least I learned my lesson before ordering actual wedding invitations.
I also recommend getting your return address on your save the dates printed on by your invitation company. It is going to get very tedious to write your address on over 100 envelopes, especially when no one will really be returning anything to you with a save the date. It’s also highly recommended as etiquette to hand write out your invitations on the envelopes. It took me a long time, so as you can see I had a nice glass of wine ready for me when I did mine to keep me sane and calm. I did mine in batches so that every day when I came home from work I tackled about 50 or so each time.
Make sure to get a digital proof of your save the dates before you order the entire batch. I have heard horror stories of brides ordering without a digital proof and getting their names misspelled or something just didn’t come out as they hoped. It’s worth it and most companies will do this for free. It saves them the hassle of getting angry customer care phone calls from brides. It’s also good to have 2-3 people proof read your invitations and save the dates to just get an extra set of eyes to catch any misspellings. It can happen especially when you look at the same words and names all the time.
For stamps, I just ordered a ton of wedding stamps on www.USPS.com – we didn’t do custom stamps for our save the dates, we just got some white wedding bell ones which looked really nice on the envelope. Half the time the post office stamps right over them anyway and you can’t even really see them.
Below are my actual save the dates, photography done by www.sylviainez.com (my best friend and amazing NJ photographer for weddings!)
The back we did 3 images from our save the date photoshoot and on the front we selected our favorite image which my fiance says “looks like a movie poster or the cover of The Notebook”) – I loved everything about our save the dates and we still get compliments from our friends and family about them. Make sure that yours set the tone for your wedding and the style. Ours is soft, romantic, classic so we made sure that all came through in our images, the lighting and the type of paper we used (a thick matte paper, not shiny).
Good luck to my fellow bride to be’s with your planning!
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