We've Got STDs!!!

.....and of course by STDs I mean Save The Dates. Did you think I meant the other kind of STDs? Come on....get your mind out of the gutter! Anyway, I can finally post about our Save The Dates because they went out in the mail earlier this week and I am getting reports that most of them have been delivered! I got the basic idea for our STDs (sorry, I really can't write out the whole thing every time!) from some Knottie bio that I looked at months ago, but I really don't remember the specific Knottie's name. She had written a little mini bio of her relationship and I loved the personalization aspect. I wanted to do something similar, so without further ado, here is what I came up with:


You should be able to click on the picture to make it bigger and read the paragraph if you want to. And please don't hold the "he votes left" part against me. I swear I would have never "said yes" had I known that part beforehand. haha :)

I made the whole design in Microsoft Publisher and it only took about 20 minutes to do, once I knew what I wanted to write. Then I took the design to Kinko's and had them all printed and cut on some heavyweight cardstock. I also bought the envelopes that matched the cardstock. For the outside, I embossed "Save the Date" in the upper left-hand corner with my latest obsession, my heat gun. I also made a quick envelope seal program in Publisher, and printed them out on colorful cardstock, because I was too excited to send them out to wait on an order of labels to arrive! I ran them through my Xyron 510 machine to make them into stickers, and convinced Ryan to help me put them on. Here he is in action, along with a picture of the finished labels (minus my address... in case any serial killers are reading):

Naturally, I had to DIY my STDs because I am so weird about having the same stuff as other people. And honestly, I couldn't really find any pre-made ones out there that I was really in love with. I think I made a good decision because this was a really inexpensive and fairly painless task, minus the envelope licking that Ryan is still complaining about to this day. Here is the cost breakdown:

Kinko's: $71 for the cardstock, printing & cutting for 140 cards as well as 140 envelopes
Michael's: $13.00 for cardstock for labels and new Xyron cartridge
USPS: $50.40 for 120 stamps (we made extra cards)
Grand Total: $134.40!!

I think $134 for the whole project, including shipping, is pretty good! I am really, really happy about how they turned out. What do you think??