Save the Date - Tutorial

I'm not going to lie, we are on a very tight budget for our wedding day of £5000. But I wanted to show you that you can make and have really special and exclusive things for your big day without them having to cost the earth! From the moment we got engaged the idea of designing and creating all of our wedding stationary was a very exciting one...almost as exciting as the hunt for THE dress!
We're very lucky in that this is one of my hobbies and something I absolutely love doing. From as far back as I can remember I've always been 'arty farty' and spent a lot of my spare time making things from paper or card.

After featuring on a blog by fellow bride to be Terri at http://www.mysticalmagicalweddings.com I thought I'd share with you just how I created our 'Save the date' cards...

We chose to send out 'Save the date's' because of getting married in December. We both knew that a lot of our friends & relatives would have family commitments or work parties around that time so we wanted to make sure they all knew well in advance and would then hopefully be able to share in our special day with us.

To make you will need:

•  White A4 card (I used linen effect)
•  A photo of your choice
•  Black A4 card for mounting
•  Black 'Stickles' glitter glue 
•  Silver star stickers
•  Black 'Save the Date' word peel offs
•  Black 5mm organza ribbon
•  Silver star charms
•  Pink heart lollipops

Firstly, you need to cut the white card into quarters...

 I marked it out with a ruler and then used a guillotine for a really straight & smooth edge. You then need to shape the corners so you end up with a giant luggage tag shape and punch a hole in the middle of the shaped edge about 12mm in from the edge so you end up with something looking like this...

Next you will need to take your photo and stick it onto some black card to mount it and give the photo a bit of a border. We chose a black & white photo as it fitted in with our black & white theme, and a car as my other half is a bit of a petrolhead! We then photo shopped our names onto the picture...

 

 These photos appear on our wedding invitations, orders of service and also our menus to carry the theme right through our wedding stationary. You then need to stick this onto your large luggage tag. I stuck ours on at a jaunty angle as I felt they looked better like this and would sit better with the stars we added later.

 I then added the 'save the date' wording peel offs, these are from www.craftcreations.co.uk and come in a range of fonts and colours. I then added the silver stars (also from craft creations) and finally the little dots of black 'Stickles' glitter glue to create a cascading effect across the tag.

Following this I then took a 10 inch length of ribbon and added a small silver star charm (these came from ebay - £2.99 for 400!!)...

 I then threaded this through the hole in the luggage tag and looped it back through on itself to secure it and leave the star charm on the front of the card...

 We then decided to add heart shaped lollipops to them by simply tying them on, for a bit of fun and also to tie in with our theme for the reception where we're giving our guests haribo hearts & rings (only right given that other half is a member of the haribo fan club!) and the evening reception where we're having a candy store full of retro sweets (again these came from a sweet shop on ebay and cost us £3.99 for 50!)...

 And finally, using a silver pen, I wrote the basic details for our guests on the reverse...

 We also added a smaller black tag to ours which gave our guests the link to our wedding website along with the password they would need to access it. I've shown you how to make them the same as ours but it's entirely up to you and your choice of colours, themes etc.

In total these have cost us £12 to make 40. We also sat and made them together which was a really nice thing to do! 

I hope this can be of some help to some of you who are also getting married on a budget.

xx