Save the Dates - Minted

As I am making a true effort to work through my January list - I am spending a lot of QT on Minted!  Minted and I are becoming quite good friends...and I thought it might be a good time to go back and walk you through the process of us choosing our Save the Dates!

I knew we were likely to want to use Minted, or one of the similar sites for our save the dates and invitations, so when we first started talking about them I went online and ordered a bunch of samples!  At the time, Ant wasn't super interested in talking about them...so I figured having a few hard copies to look at would help. and I was RIGHT!!  Being able to put them in front of him, he quickly gave me opinions, which got the ball rolling right along.  Below are a few of the ones from our first batch:

Minted's Metro Green Line

Minted's Timeless

Minted's Roll of the Dice

These samples taught us a few things:

1.  We did not want pictures on our invitation, like the Metro Green Line invitation

2.  We did not want multiple pictures on anything - like the Metro Green Line

3.  We LOVED the save the date magnet with one photo - but not the font and design of Timelesss

4.  We wanted our invitation to be more exciting - Lucky in Love is way too simple

So, that round of samples was kind of a flop - but allowed me to refocus with a new sense of what I was looking for!  We decided that the invitations and save the dates were not going to be matching - so we put invitations to the side and focused on save the date magnets with one photo.  We've had a couple of friends use the magnets over the last couple years - and we loved them!  You're never going to lose it!! I had my heart set on black and white when I saw these two samples:

Minted's Meet in the Middle

Minted's Belle Memoire

They were perfect - I loved the way the black and white looked - and each one had an interesting font without being too much.  I liked the way the date was written on Belle Memoire, as the focus of the wording....and absolutely ADORED the "Save Our Date" wording in meet in the middle.  The script is pretty and interesting without being over the top.  We made samples of both - below is our Belle Memoire.  While I still really love the way the date looks, we decided it was too much with the picture we had chosen to use.

After deciding we were definitely going to use Meet in the Middle - I started playing with the words.  On the sample, the words fall right in the middle, but that puts it right over my face!  We were able to move it down to the bottom of the photo - what you see below is my rough editing.  Minted took it and straightened everything and made it perfect!  They were also able to add our wedding website at the very bottom, in much smaller font.  As you can see below - the final and biggest change we made was that we ended up using color!  I decided the coloring of the photo we picked was simple enough that it wasn't distracting.  The pretty water backdrop looks way nicer in color also!

We are thrilled with the way the final product came out!  I love the unique and simple wording of "save our date" as opposed to "save the date"...because at the end of the day, that's what it's going to be - our date!  We sent out about 100 of these at the end of November - which was quite the chore!  If there is one thing I can't recommend highly enough, it's the skinny wrap!  These stickers come with the save the dates - and have your return address on the front and the beautiful "save our date" on the back.  They were super easy to use and saved us the hassle of writing our return address 100 times! I also think they do a really nice easy job of dressing up the envelope.  Ant and I decided to handwrite the addresses - and spent a week or so writing them a dozen at a time.

 If I can give you ONE piece of advice - start organizing and collecting addresses as SOON as you start putting together an invite list.  That was half our battle - in order to write out a save the date, we had to research and collect the address first!  It made it all take way longer.  But it was such a good feeling when we finally dropped them in the mail! and I loved getting texts and pictures back as people received them!  This one if one of my favorites - we have three friends that live in the same apartment in Boston - each one got their own save the date - that's a lot of us on one fridge!!

How did you decide on a Save the Date?  Minted could not have been easier to use - but there are so many choices out there!  Where did you order yours from?