Save that Date! (Part 1)

Opie and I dropped off all but 2 of the Save-the-Dates at the post office today! It's a pretty neat feeling, I must say. The wedding has felt very real for a very long time now, but sending out postcards telling all of our friends and family the official date makes it all that much more.. official!

I suspect some of our local guests might get the postcard STDs (this acronym is always fun for the immature like myself) by tomorrow. Before I went to the trouble of stamping and embossing all 60 or so of the STDs, I mailed myself a copy to make sure it survived the hands of the postal service. It returned to me the very next day slightly worse for wear, but perfectly acceptable in my mind. It just has a few small smudges and a neon orange tracking bar across the bottom of the front design. I think that's to be expected with something that's travelling without an envelope.

There are already a number of handy dandy heat embossing tutorials out there on the net (like this one by Miss Fondue on Weddingbee) so I probably won't go into great detail about that portion of its creation, but I will give you a general idea of the DIY process for our STDs.

First, I created the text portion of the STD in Photoshop. It took quite a few hours of fiddling around with fonts and layouts until I achieved something I was happy with. Then I showed it to Opie and he didn't care for the way his name was written. Seeing as the STD is an informal notice of our date, I felt like it'd be a great time to let my relatives know that he goes by Opie, since his real name (from which Opie is not even remotely derived) is all that will appear on our invitations. He was concerned that there'd be a disjoint in communication, and ample confusion if the STD just calls him Opie, and the invitation only calls him by his given name. I knew he was probably right, but I cried about it and fought it nonetheless. I know, I know, total overreaction, but I had just spent a metric $#!%-ton of time adjusting font spacing and alignment that 8 more characters would completely, entirely throw off, and I don't think my hormones were behaving well that day. Egh. Poor Opie.

Here's the first creation that caused the tears. Like the obvious pseudonyms to protect our identity on the interwebz?
The fonts are Poor Richard and Scriptina. I love Scriptina.

Unfortunately, Scriptina became far too much for the design when 8 characters were added to Opie's otherwise very abbreviated name. I had to start exploring new fonts. Explore, explore, explore. I'm not sure how many fonts I downloaded from fontspace.com in the pursuit of the perfect combination of fonts!

I was initially set on a serif font for the information and a script font for our names, as in the first iteration of the design. I eventually found that it needed to be simplified more than that. I wound up using two fonts from fontspace that seem to me to belong to a bygone era - Aspire (the Script-ish font) and Parisian (the san serif font). I actually found both by searching the 1920s tag on fontspace.

See? I put Opie's real name (not actually Opediah, though that's what I often tell people his given name is when they're being nosy) followed by his nickname in quotation marks. This satisfied both of us, finally.

The colors got corrupted in the file conversion of those images, but the vital information is in an espresso/chocolate brown, while the names are in green. I laid out the file with 4 STDs per 8.5"x11" page. I then printed them on ivory cardstock from Staples with my Canon printer. This went really quickly, and while I was concerned about paper jams with my top loading printer, there were no snags at all.

I then snuck into my old high school (I always go in holding a note like I'm on my way to the office or back to class, since I can still blend in as a student, which is much easier than dealing with the visitation rules. Don't tell on me!) with the ruse of visiting an old art teacher, and used the art department's paper cutter to neatly cut them all in about 5 minutes. Since I was being all sneaky-like, I don't have any pictures of this step, but it's a very standard guillotine-like paper cutter that threatens to chop off offending fingers.

^Like so^

While this project would surely have been expedited with the help of various willing friends or family, I ran solo on about 99% of it and still made pretty good time on it. I got a great portion of it finished during Opie's last business trip. It was good to have something to keep me busy in his absence.

Alas, it's past my bedtime but if my packed study schedule tomorrow allows, I'll finish filling you in on our Save the Dates!