Creating our Save the Dates: Step 3 - Formatting and Printing

I guess I should take a step back and actually show you my inspiration before I get into the details of how I put it all together. I got a little ahead of myself with the Font selection yesterday.

First, I wanted to use Kraft paper somehow in my save the dates and carry it into my invitations later. When I saw these invitations featured on Style Me Pretty I decided that I need to also try my hand at adding stitching.

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I also decided on setting my font to fill the width of the invitation like these save the dates that I had found on 100 Layer Cake.

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Now I just had to put it all together and make it work.

I purchased 8.5 x 11 Kraft card stock from Michael's, and to give myself a little more room I opted to split the paper into 3 - 3.6"x8.5" sections in Word, rather then in 4 - 4.25"x5.5" sections.

I searched through Google image results and Save the Date Websites to come up with the wording I wanted and combined a few that I liked, to it ours. I didn't want to go formal as I felt that would clash with the casual wedding we were planning. My Mr thinks its a little silly but I thought it suited us and so we went with this...

I also left space at the bottom of each column so that I could adhere the sticker to each invitation.

*Originally I was going to have the black text white but when I went to print it I realized quickly that that wouldn't work as I don't have white toner, and since I was printing on Kraft paper I couldn't even do the an outline in another color so it would look white. I tried greys and yellows but they didn't show up well, so I settled on black.


After I designed the invitations I needed to put the stickers together. I wanted round stickers for this and my mother was visiting at the time, so she made a visit to Michael's for me. She could only find ONE type of round sticker, the Gartner Chocolate and Ivory Circle Favor Tags.

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Luckily they matched well with my Kraft paper but they turned out to be very annoying to format and print as they were on 3.5"x11" strips. The color laser printer wouldn't feed them properly so I had to manual feed them one at a time through my desktop black and white laser printer, which meant I had to forgo colored text as I had originally planned.

Gartner does provide a free template on their website which I downloaded but again they weren't that user friendly.

If I could do it again I would have ordered 8.5x11 sheets of round stickers off one the the online label sites but I procrastinated and wanted them out before Christmas, so I adapted.

I fully expect people to use the sticker on their calendar to mark the date, so I included enough information on the sticker to stand alone and not need the Save the Date for reference. But I was also working with a small space, so I went with this...

Once I printed everything I cut them up with a paper cutter. Unfortunately I didn't space things as perfectly in Word as I had thought so the invitations were all the same width but at least the cuts were even and who's going to take their invitation over to someone else's house and compare?!

I have decided NOT to sweat the small stuff!

Next up...Putting it all together.