Pink Lemonade: Our Save the Dates!

It’s time to reveal the Cheetah Save the Dates! Sometimes decisions are easy, and lucky for me the design of our STDs* was one of those times. After we got engaged I knew exactly how I wanted our STDs to look—thankfully Mr. Cheetah was totally on board (he’s good like that).

I envisioned a 5 x 7 card with a hand illustrated image of Mr. Cheetah & me in Palm Springs, the other side of the card would have all the important info that Save the Dates usually have (mostly who, where, & when) and it would all look like a pretty little package. Deciding on the illustration was the hardest part—I’m an artist and Mr. Cheetah is known to draw (he has done our Holidays cards in years past), so I felt pressure to create the illustration ourselves—I even sketched out a mock up. But drawing/painting isn’t my concentration (sculpture, photography and video make up most of my work) and the more I thought about it the more I wanted the illustration to be drawn in someone else’s hand—a style different than our own. So I turned to Etsy and created my first Alchemy request. Success! Just check it out:

Admit it, you love it too. It's by the absolutely wonderful LeFrenchCircus. And it’s exactly how I had imagined--no, wait, it's even better.

I designed the other side in Illustrator using EcuyerDAX and Nelly Scripts fonts:

Since it’s a semi-destination wedding I also made up a one-sided insert that directs guests to our website for more info on travel & lodging:

I had the actual Save the Dates and the inserts printed professionally. To save a little bit of money I had the inserts printed two to a page and then I just cut them in half with my paper trimmer. I tied the STD and insert together in bundle with a tag (Mr. Cheetah offered to help, but I can be a aesthetics control freak and I only trusted my fingers to tie the bows just so).

Here is a close up of the date tag and the essential and ubiquitous bakers twine. Man, I hope that stuff never goes out of style; I love it like Cookie Monster loves cookies. Or like Dylan McKay loves Kelly Taylor. Pick your favorite cultural reference ;).

I tried numerous designs for the tags; little palm trees, our names, the website address… but the simple date design turned out looking the best. I printed these out on my home printer on heavy linen paper (love) and then punched each out with a handy tag-shaped punch.

Here is the back after bundling:

Now it was time for the envelopes—which I foolishly left to the last minute—get all your supplies in advance—waaaay in advance. I knew I wanted the envelopes in one of our wedding colors, so I looked at Kelly Paper and Xpedx (where I picked up the linen paper for the tags), but their A7 envelopes options were limited to white. So I had to pay a bit more for envelopes at the DIY bridal mecca: Paper Source. I considered a few colors (pink, yellow, grey) but in the end both Mr. Cheetah and I loved the sophisticated modern look of the black envelopes. I may have been able to find black envelopes for a better price online, but then there are shipping costs and I needed to get these babies out the door and in our guests’ mailboxes. Plus while at Paper Source I bought their envelope liner templates and some amazing patterned paper for liners in our wedding colors.

I cut out all the liners and attached them with double-sided tape—which seems to have worked quite well.

How awesome is that paper?

I have wanted to make wrap around address labels ever since I first discovered them a year or two ago (probably on Weddingbee). After a few rounds of designing we decided on this one I made in Illustrator. I printed them, cut them out and then ran them through my Xyron—and voila, DIY address labels! A little trick I learned: pre-fold the labels before putting them through the Xyron, it makes them easier to line up.

To top it all off we used a Hawaii Rainforest stamp—a detail I’m sure no one noticed, but it was special to us since the first half of the proposal happened in Hawaii.