Jackie and I have five weddings this year. That resulted in four “save the dates” that I got in the mail. Of those four, two were magnets, one was a card, and the last was a sticker. When I started thinking about my save the dates, I wanted to do something that I hadn’t seen yet. I wanted something that could be used by the people I was sending them to. I didn’t want them to receive something they just put in a draw or stuck on a fridge. I wanted people to interact with them, physically touch them, even on a daily basis. That’s when I thought of it; bookmarks. Everybody reads in some fashion. Whether it be books or magazines, everybody needs to keep their place.
Once the idea was there, it was now a matter of how to execute it. How many do we send people? How do we package them? What do we put on them? I’ll answer that last question first because it was the easiest to answer. We had such wonderful pictures from our friends at Henry & Masci Photography, it would be a shame not to use them. Now that we had the content (the usual words with some pretty pictures to accompany them), it was now time to design. We wanted to use as many pictures as possible, so we decided to have the bookmarks be double-sided. One side would have two images with some text and the other side would just be an image. When we thought about that, it became obvious that we should give each person multiple bookmarks. We decided that each person would get three 2×6 inch bookmarks, each with a different picture on the back. Since we were printing them on 6×8 inch paper, that left one 2×6 inch piece left. That would turn into our wrapper to bind all the bookmarks into one neat little package.
We had the bookmarks printed by 4by6.com on 6×8 inch card stock with a satin finish. We couldn’t be happier with the final result. I spent hours cutting each grouping while Jackie printed out mailing and return address labels. We had photo stamps made using yet another engagement photo and we have to say we are very proud of what we produced.
Even though we loved our idea, that wasn’t enough for us. Jackie and I decided to make wallpapers for the computer and even the iPhone so that people (mostly family because I think they’re the only ones who could stare at us for that long) could be reminded anytime they turned on their computer or looked at their phone. The lesson I learned in doing all of this is that it’s not enough to just have something done because it needs to be done. You need to be creative, think of a concept, and execute something you can be proud of. I think Jackie and I did that.
Written by: Paul Kelley on 07/06/2009 at 9:51 pm | Filed under: Ceremony, Invitations, Planning, Reception
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