An Engaged Wedding Planner’s Guide to Save-the-Dates

If you’re like me, small details, especially stationery, make your heart skip a beat. I LOVE getting mail, and I knew I wanted our stationery to reflect the tone we are designing for our big day.

Because I wanted the save-the-dates to complement the overall invitation and day-of stationery design, I needed to think about all of this early on. As we envisioned the flowers and tablescape, the stationery naturally came together. From there, we were able to combine our favourite elements to be reflected in the invitation suite.

I considered using Minted Weddings, (which I am a big fan of, and Pastiche is part of their wedding planner program so working with me also means you get access to exclusive features and pricing!), but for us, going custom made more sense since I couldn’t quite tweak everything I wanted to include our personal elements.

My sister has an incredible eye for design so we together we created a custom crest for us. Nick’s family has a crest so we used elements from it (like the grapes, shield, and MORO ribbon to be added after we become husband and wife) to pay homage while also incorporating modern elements to match our wedding vibe. This will also complement something exciting that my dad will be designing for our invitation suite (can’t wait for you to see!). Now there are many ways to incorporate a crest and we didn’t want it to be over the top or too cheesy so you will see it in the save-the-dates and a few other day-of stationery elements.

I do love the modern trend of photographs as part of the save-the-date but everything we tried just didn’t feel very us. Enter Heather from Red Bicycle Paper Co. who is an incredibly inspirational fellow business owner and stationery wiz who helped me make sense of my vision and put all of this together. We decided to include one of my favourite shots from our Distillery engagement party session by Muguet Photography on the back of the save-the-date which kept the design elements but also make it more personal.

Now without getting further into it, Heather was dealing with some unpredictable circumstances and wasn’t able to execute the envelope printing for me. I was in a bind as my parents were bringing save-the-dates to Ukraine to invite friends and family. Again, Heather is an incredible professional and just went above and beyond given her situation. She introduced me to Ashley of Tayne & Ashley who she’d been working with, and Ashley saved the day and produced these gorgeous envelopes for me in a pinch. Sidenote: your vendors work incredibly hard for you. Remember that despite whatever heavy, complicated things they might be dealing with in their personal lives, we always find a way to get it done for you. In the grand scheme of things these are just save-the-dates, but as a fellow vendor as well as client in this instance, I appreciated both of these amazing, hard-working ladies so much.

Next, I wanted to play with some vintage stamps and see if we could make it work for our design. I had ordered some custom stamps from Canada Post (these come in Permanent, US or International - I ordered the Permanent in 3 designs and just doubled up for the US invitations, as I mentioned, my parents physically brought over the ones to Ukraine since we were unsure about delivery). The photo version of the custom stamp complements the photo on the back of the save-the-date card. The other vintage stamps (also real stamps!) came from Apartment Shop and I realized I was able to customize even further by grouping some of the stamps for each person specifically. I.e. my friends and family in BC got the Victoria, and general west coast related stamps; my friend who I drove across the country with last year got the Trans-Canada Highway stamp; our family in Manitoba got the Winnipeg and prairies stamps etc.

Finally, the wax seal. In 2017 Nick and I bought this beautiful seal kit in Venice and we knew we’d want to use it one day in something wedding related. I ordered some glue gun wax sticks on Amazon and little adhesive backings from Stampitude and pre-made the wax seals. There are some gorgeous custom ready-made options, but since we had this, I figured I’d try it. Melting directly on the envelopes proved to be too messy and inconsistent (the traditional candle melt method will work better for one or two letters but not for large quantities). Creating these wax seal stickers was pretty easy (and quite therapeutic) and as far as I know, they all made it through the post!

I absolutely love how all of this came together. It’s very classic, it speaks to the theme and what to expect with a kind of relaxed Italian summer garden vibe, and it features so many meaningful pieces. My favourite part was getting everyone’s messages and how excited they were.

Got questions? Let me know what you think or want to know more about below!

Happy planning!