Once we decided that the lace handkerchief paisley design would be our inspiration, I knew that I wanted to put it on all of our print pieces. We started looking at different invitation vendors for a good Save the Date format. I knew that I wanted to include a photo of us, a guide to Greenville, and a schedule of wedding weekend events. We looked a tri-folds and other options, but I wanted to print the photo directly onto the paper instead of having to enclose a real photograph in the packet. We weren’t really able to find everything we needed and all of the vendors we’d found didn’t really understand my vision of including the lace design or wanting anything to do with my project. I was pretty discouraged in the beginning. The Save the Date had to be the attention-getter, the first piece that would really brand our event, and had to entice our guests to travel far and wide to the destination. A lot of people had never heard of Greenville before and we had to really sell it to them, so this piece needed to be huge!
Because my parents live in Dallas and I knew we could find some really talented invitation designers there, my mom agreed to kind of “be in charge” of all of the wedding paper. We knew we had to “go custom” and after our meetings with the designer she would stay in touch with them and make sure our vision was being accurately executed. We went to Lauren Robinson of The Write Print in Dallas. Lauren is a fantastic invitation designer that works out of her home. We came up with a beautiful idea to do a folder with four or five inserts. The cover of the folder was the lace design in gold with a pink satin ribbon around the middle to hold it together with a little card that said, “erin & todd 05.03.08.” I love all lowercase lettering and I love ampersands!
Todd and I really enjoyed writing the content for the Save the Dates. We picked our favorite things to do in Greenville and wrote restaurant reviews and park reviews. We included a very sweet letter to our invitees letting them know why we had chosen Greenville as our location and how much we thought they would enjoy it.
This is the final Save the Date. Please excuse the terrible photography!
{Author’s personal collection, 2007}