the creation/evolution/aggravation of our save-the-dates

by now, almost all of you have received a handmade/blood-sweat-and-tears-stained/smudgy/several-random-shades-of-purple/awesome save-the-date from us. we worked hard on those bad boys. like two months worth. and they almost didn't happen. but let me take you on a journey, dear reader...a journey of insanity that only casey and i would be game to try and complete amidst the other deadlines of wedding-related stuff and life-related stuff.

basically, it all started with this:

(source- i have no idea who made this. i will worship at your feet forever, though, o creative god)

i was surfing the net in the early days of our engagement and happened upon the above image. and i fell in love. and i fell HARD. i mean, look at it! it's pretty and unique and so very them. i feel like i already know this couple. they have a dog! and they like music!

so, like any well-meaning person, i blatantly ripped them off. after several iterations, the result was this:
i dug it. i liked the colours, the boxes, the eye-popping graphic nature of the whole damn thing. a circus tent for me, a video game console for casey, gears for the theme...it was/is magic. some things i didn't like- the books in the center of the page did not read to me like books (no pun intended) and for the life of me, i could not fill in that film strip in the upper right-hand corner with anything interesting enough.

so after discussion with others and lots of personal time agonizing over the decision, i chopped that sucker in half. and it resulted in more or less what you have in your hand today. with some gold accents for pop.

now. casey and i could have gone to a printer to have this made for you. it would have been slick, clean, pristine, if you will. but we didn't want that. we wanted gritty, distressed, handmade goodness to explode all over that page. so we made the (right?) decision to silk screen all of the posters. when silk screening, you cannot print an entire poster out at one time. you must separate all the colours into several passes and print them one at a time. that means, people, for each save-the-date, we had to pass over it four times!!

here's the breakdown/ ATTEND:

see all that work? and trust me, it didn't go as smoothly as what was just described to you. we had to do a lot of other passes to correct mistakes, to make some colours darker, etc.

casey lines up the screen with the print.

i apply the ink.

the half-finished posters take over our living room for about two months.

yes, you read that right. we spent two months getting these posters as good as they could be. and we had issues. things like getting the ink the colour we wanted. we often had to resort to mixing the colours ourselves. then the ink would dry in the screen and we'd have to wash it out and wait for it to dry and try again. about halfway through i decided that we weren't going to print them ourselves and started looking at printers to do it for us, only to persevere and barely get through the last two passes. casey was a saint, btw. kept me from chucking the whole project off the top of our building.

i point out problems with the almost-finished posters to janel.

but in the end, we were happy with what you got. mostly because we finished the whole project. definitely because it reflects who we are. it's not perfect, or clean, or even legible in some areas, but we think it gets casey+janine across just fine.



p.s. and because i can't leave well enough alone, here is a cute picture of janel graciously stamping the backs of our save-the-dates. note her patented stacking method.