Save the Date Cards in Process!

Good morning!

I know I up and said I wasn't doing any wedding planning, but going to a bachelorette party over the weekend initiated many, many the question about what plans Matthew and I had for getting married, and gosh darn it, it's got me thinking wedding all over again! We've wanted to get hitched pretty much since we met, but the daunting task of putting together a major, crazy-huge event like the kind of wedding we would want has honestly had me cowed for lo, these many years that we've been engaged. However! I think it might be time to dip our toes in the waters of making it legal for real. Watch me have a complete melt down and just do a courthouse wedding, but something's gotta give before 2014. A five year engagement is too long for us!

My sister Sus and her fiancé Matt, who works as a graphic designer, very kindly offered to help me through their print shop connections with making my save-the-date postcards. Last night, I took Sharpie to paper and worked on a mock-up of the kind of thing I would want. 10-07-13 is a Monday in October, so it's just a placeholder date for whatever we end up deciding on, but what do you think about the layout and design? My secret, in my head aesthetic when it comes to doodles like this is MTV circa 1982-- think pastel-erized moon landing footage and animated doodles all over a still photo. I put together this picture of the two of us, inside a little wedding band Venn diagram. Imagine something like this if all the lines were a little more uniform and the cursive was an actual font instead of reflective of my checkered past in learning handwriting. My one regret is Bab's bucket-looking head...he's so much handsomer in real life! But this was the best I could do under pressure. How does it strike you? 

The back of the card, no duh, would just be our names and maybe the date again and the intimation that there will be some kind of filgree'd, formal thing to follow this, plus a shout out to whatever free wedding website we end up setting up.

After I scanned the above doodles and got some positive feedback from "the pro's", I grabbed a set of coloring pencils and went to work on the colors-- again, keeping that MTV look in mind, I wanted a palette that most closely resembled a pack of Fruit Stripe Gum...all bright colors and zebra stripes! What do you think? Is it better in black and white? These wouldn't be the final colors, but again, something similar to and in the same light-bright gradient family.

An earlier version of the same layout, with less crazy colors and lines....I think I like the "more is more" of the one above.

I have a history of doodling Matthew and I whenever I'm bored, but here's the only other "formal portrait" (haha) I've done of the two of us. Matthew's mom, Deb, took me to the Frist for the Golden Age of Couture exhibit, and one of the hands on activities upstairs in the kid's zone was a really neat "make your own print on fabric" thing. You were given a styrofoam rectangle and a dull-edged, pencil-kind-of-implement to carve out your image. An onsite assistant then took your carving, inked it up, and ran it through a little press that rolled the image onto the cloth. I think this turned out really well, if I do say so myself! Matthew had a moustache at the time, and don't we look dapper in shades of ombre!

For comparison, here's the real "us" on New Year's of this year. It is no trick of the camera, my head really is that big:

Earlier sketches, where neither of us look like either of us:

Look how reptilian poor bibi looks in the last panel! And how I look like a white, less pretty, slightly cross-eyed  Beyoncé. What was my hand doing?! I never said I was no artist. :)

Anyway, what do you think? If you're married or thinking about it, what did you do for your save the dates? I keep seeing all these amazing, printed-on-floral-hankerchief numbers, or ones-that-can-be-planted-because-they-secretly-contain-flower-seeds (our friends Michael and Elizabeth actually did that for their wedding, and it was actually awesome), but I think I just want something really handmade and dear, like my poor little sub-art sketchings. Is that lame?

When I get my act more together on planning, I'll let you all know! In the meantime, though, any advice you have, especially fellow Nashville peeps, would be very appreciated.

Til tomorrow!

PS: If you like ACTUAL art-type things, you should check on Matt and Sus's sticker page on Etsy, and Sus's personal art page. They're pretty dang good at what they do! I'm so happy they're willing to help me out. :)