The big reveal: STD edition!

Now that I've received some positive feedback in the form of text messages with multiple capital letters and exclamation points from friends all over the country, I think it's safe to assume that most of our guests have received their save the dates.  So, without further ado, here they are!!

Zee "back":

And zee "front":

So, here's how these little pups came to be.  As you may recall, I was pretty wishy-washy on the whole STD thing. While daydreaming about what our STDs would look like if we did them, I quickly determined that if we were going to do STDs, we'd do postcards.  Why?  A couple reasons:

• They are cheaper to mail, postage-wise.
• They don't require envelopes (another cost-savings).
•  A lot of couples do magnets, and I was interested in doing something slightly different.
• Postcards aren't relegated to magnetic surfaces only - they can be tacked to corkboards, used as bookmarks, or still slapped on a fridge with a recipient's pre-owned, fully-functional magnets... think of all the possible places our STD could end up!!
• And, most importantly of all, they're shockingly affordable to print!

A while back in my wedding planning, I stumbled upon a nice little site called VistaPrint, which basically lets you print anything you want on any type of item you want.  Periodically, they run obscene sales, offering things like 100 postcards for free - all you have to pay for is shipping!  A few months ago, I got bitten by the STD bug.  Before getting ahead of myself, I decided to double-check with our photog to make sure she was OK with using an e-pic on the mailer (fortunately, she warmly agreed!).  With our photographer's blessing, all I had to do was keep an eye out for another one of those pesky sales.  Sure enough, shortly after the first of the year, I had a message in my inbox saying that I could make 100 postcards for zilch.  I dove into action, using my handy-dandy Microsoft Publisher software, a decent amount of patience, and the better part of one afternoon.

I really liked the idea of including a picture of us and a calendar.  Fortunately, the software makes it ridiculously easy... all you do is enter your month and year of choice, and you're good to go!  I then added the heart, using one of their pre-designed shape models, tweaking its size, placement, and transparency (so you can see the date it's highlighting).  For the text, I downloaded a new font called "Throw My Hands Up in the Air" from dafont.com, using the steps I outlined here.  I then saved my Publisher document as a PDF, uploaded it to VistaPrint's website, and that was pretty much it!  All I had to pay for was shipping, 2 upload fees (which happened to be 50% off, so $2.50 each), and back-side printing.

Overall, are they absolutely perfect in every single way?  No, not quite.  I was nervous about part of the calendar or text being cut off during the printing process, so I erred on the side of caution with the bleed marks.  As a consequence, I had some minor white border action going on: 

I decided that that wasn't the end of the world nor was it worth the extreme losses of time and sanity it would cost me to try and meticulously trim all the edges of all the postcards.  For the cheap, cheap price I paid, I figured it was a fair trade-off to have some minor imperfections.  I said "good enough" and carried on my merry way... well, almost.  I didn't mind the white edges, but part of me wanted a little something more out of these postcards, so I decided to add an extra touch.  More on that to come!

How did your STDs come into existence?

(all photos personal.)