Save the Dates
All the books say your invites are the first impression your guests have of your wedding so express your theme, level of formality, color scheme, fonts, etc in your invites and be consistent throughout the wedding. No pressure there...
We chose to send Save the Dates because this wedding is essentially a destination wedding for our guests to the all-inspiring State of Delaware. Because Save the Dates are supposed to be sent 6 months before the wedding, I only had a few months from getting engaged in October, finding the venue and key vendors and answer all those very-important "first impression" questions above before these babies had to go out for out-of-town guests.
Here's what I wrote about the STD cards in the moment:
I made my own Save the Date cards because the project helped me to organize my thoughts about the color palette. I ended up using (in Michael's card stock color names) Metallic Kiwi for the cardstock, layered with Dark Blue, and then topped with Cool Metallic Artic Snow vellum in Metallic Silver envelopes. Ironically, I neded up not using my primary color (Icy Blue) in the cards. I planned on making pale blue pansies for the bottom corners, but the card looked too busy with it so I left them off. We embossed our return address with the embosser Craig's parents bought us as an engagement present. We asked for it so we could use it repeatedly on both the STD cards, the invites, and thank you notes.
Now that I'm further along in the wedding planning, I like them but don't really love them the way I love my wedding invites. When I made them, I was really annoyed at the crass commercialism rampant in the wedding industry and I wanted to give a personal touch. I look back now and wonder if my personal touch was too homemade looking....