Save-The-Date Send-Off

Man, what a crazy few months it's been.  I can't believe Kevin and I have already passed the six month mark to our wedding date!  It's true what they say- engagement time flies by fast, and I've been doing my best trying to keep up and stay on top of all of my wedding craftiness.  I have a few big wedding projects that I can't wait to start documenting here on this blog, but to start I figured I would share our Save-the-Dates that Kevin and I just mailed out this week.  It was quite a process to get everything made and put together, but I have to say I'm pretty proud of what we came up with:

I wish I could say that I came up with the original concept of the magnet and envelope myself, but the credit should really go to a few unknown creative individuals on Pinterest.  The inspiration came from these two images:  

Since I knew the theme of our wedding would revolve around trees and other objects found in nature, the wood-slice magnets seemed like a great fit.  I was able to find a round stamp with a design I liked on Etsy (found here), and Kevin's dad cut all of the wood pieces for us which was a huge help.  As far as the magnets on the back, we just bought a magnet strip (the kind that comes in a roll), cut it into pieces and attached it to the backs using super glue. (A helpful tip: do not use hot glue for that step.  We found that out the hard way.)

Aren't they pretty?  So happy with how they turned out!

For the envelopes, I purchased the tags at Office Depot and typed them all using an old electric typewriter that I borrowed from my mom's office.  Despite having to type out about 95 tags it was a pretty quick and painless process.

The cards were put together by a co-worker of mine and were printed at my agency's in-house print shop, so we saved ourselves some cash in the process.  The magnets were attached to the cards using removable glue dots which allowed the recipients to separate the pieces if they wanted.

For those engaged couples out there who are thinking of doing something similar to this for your Save-the-Dates, before you buy stamps I would highly recommend taking one of your finished pieces to the Post Office so they can weigh it and tell you the proper postage to use.  I made sure to do this before shipping out all of ours, but since each magnet was slightly different in size and shape, some envelopes weighed more than others.  This lead to some delivery problems.  Lesson learned: More postage is better than not enough postage.  Better to be safe than sorry, especially when you're mailing out something that you've put so much effort into!

I'll be posting again soon to finally share the most time-consuming project that I decided to take on for the big day, but until then I'll leave you with a sneak peek...:-)

(And this was only half!)