DIY Save the Date

So I got the super honor of making our friends a Save the Date. Emma sent me a message, which I saw at 3am this morning (the puppy was making lots of noise...), asking me to help. I was so excited I barely fell asleep afterwards! So after all the morning routines I got to work:
They wanted something they could send out electronically, but these can easily be printed out, too. The theme for their wedding is lace, which of course had to be incorporated into the design. Emma wants to have a elegant, but still pretty wedding. No pink, no bows, nothing too cutesy. It felt like lace in combination with subtle monochrome tones would do the trick.

I had this lace band at home, which I thought would frame the text beautifully. Emma wanted something pretty neutral as a background, so I used this postal office packing paper that has these beige stripes. I scanned the paper and the lace on top of each other like this:

So get some paper/fabric/anything you might want to use as a background, and scan it.
Then I used a photo software (Pixelmator for Mac) to cut out a piece:

Since I wanted lace at the top and the bottom, I copied the image, added it on above of the first one, and rotated 180 degrees:

Then I used BeFunky.com to make this old sun bleached effect:

(BeFunky --> Old photo --> Old photo 13 --> effect at about 70-80%
There are tons of fun effects there, so play around to see if you find something you like.
Save at the best possible quality!

Now I needed to get the line out from the middle, so I used a blur effect to brush it out:

(So if you didn't double the image, you don't have a line to brush out)
Then I started using iDraw (for Mac).
At this point I made the file 1200px wide, just so it's a smaller file to work with.
Then I put in the text:
Emma and me came to the conclusion that it looked best when "Save the Date" and the date we're in a huge font. After all, it is a VERY important date! It looked fun, too, to have this fancy font for the big words, and a more playful one for the rest.
Then it felt like there needed to be something between the name and the invitation-bit, hence the little dots, which I also made with iDraw.
This one I printed out on on our regular printer, they'd look awesome printed on thicker paper (that can be done at for example Office Max).

(Fonts: Save the Date is Two For Juan NF, the the rest is with A Year Without Rain)
Please ask me if you have any questions and maybe are using some other software to work with your design, and I'll try to help.
Want me to make you one? Let's discuss!
Live in the SF Bay Area and want photos for your invitation? I'm on board!
[email protected]