Save the Dates!: I mailed them, people got them, how'd I do it?

In other words: My DIY wrap-around labels.

I had somewhat arbitrarily chosen Valentine's Day as my deadline to have our save the dates in the mail- ideally in the hands of our potential guests. I decided the heart theme would be cute and appropriate, and it was within the 6-8 months-out window of time to send save the dates per wedding books and websites. However, the universe and Martha Stewart had another plan in store for my little paper pretties.

I tried printing directly onto the envelope per the paper store's claim that it could be done. The inkjet results were smudgey at best. I tried typing up traditional labels and they looked not good enough. There's no better way to say it. This is where Martha comes in and gets the blame, because I found these wrap-around labels when searching MarthaStewart.com for labeling etiquette.

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I knew they would spruce up my kraft paper envelopes and make them look perfectly put together. I had to have them! Martha offered a template to make your own labels, plus instructions for how to make paper into stickers with a... sticker machine. Okay, this was climbing over my head and out of my budget. And the big kicker was that you had to hand-type all the addresses into their template and print each page one at a time! I had over 100 save the dates to send out... I was going to make technology my slave, not the other way around. Oh, and the final important piece of information about this template is that you cannot customize the font or color as far at I can tell. You're stuck with Times New Roman, italicized, in black.  So here's what I did:

Marc and I hunted down the quirky-cute font on our save the dates on My Fonts, and purchased Little Lord Fontleroy for 10 bucks. (They have a forum where you can upload a picture of a font and people can tell you what it is! Super cool).

I then opened up Word, chose a DVD Spine label template, and moved all the margins all over the place until I was happy with the size (about 9 per page). I formatted the placeholders for my mail-merge with the fonts I liked, and I trial-and-errored for several nights with "graphics" for the back side of the wrap around label until I gave in and just typed our return address. Then I merged my masterpiece with my excel spreadsheet and got... drumroll please... 2-3 pages of the same address repeated before switching to the next resulting in a 154 page document. No dice. Remember how I didn't want to be technology's slave? I spent {at least} 2 weeks wrestling with these Word and Excel documents until I gave up and could have hand-typed them all by then. Instead, I copy-pasted each formatted label into a fresh document to create these:

I thought it was only fair to show off my kick-ass work station of organization. In the background is a duvet cover I bought off my own registry because it was on sale, a hair comb that doubled as a ruler, and a poor attempt at writing with a calligraphy pen.

I printed the labels on full-sheet label paper from Staples (the $25 was steep, but not as steep as a Xyron). And I cut most of them at work (after hours, of course...) on our paper cutter. But I got impatient for this last batch, so I used a paper-cutting pen like device- the Scotch Precision Cutter, my hair comb, and an old Modern Bride. 

the whole package, coming together

return address on the back

lovely wrapped up edges

$1 Rockefeller Center stamps to cover postage to Ireland. I struggled with the aesthetics until I realized the Rock might be cool to the Irish cousins.

beautiful, color palette coordinating love stamps. with hearts!

That's the short version of the story. I waited to tell it because I was too angry about the whole shenanigan and I had to wait for some of it to burn off. Short version of the long story short: This last batch of missing and erroneous addresses finally went out in early April. A good while past my Valentine's deadline. (Though the first and biggest batch went out in early March, I swear!)

Fortunately, the beauty in the details was worth it to me! 

What really makes me smile is that for all the many blog posts I read on Weddingbee and on other brides' blogs about the mind-numbing unexpected complications that addressing invitation and save the dates brings with them, I still had the gaul to think I had it under control. Like they'd never heard of mail-merge. Silly me =)

What unexpected projects gave you trouble? Was it worth it in the end?