On [recycled] Postcards and Wedding Planning. Save the Date: DIY

The wedding planning isn't as crazy or time consuming as I expected...but I still have 138 days to go, so I may take that back sooner or later. Since I'm not even living in the state that the wedding will be in, my mom and sister have been HUGE helps with finding decorations and coming up with ideas.

We already booked our venue, so that takes care of a lot of questions and helps us in all the rest of the planning. Obviously, it's too early to send out invitations, but I wanted to get Save the Dates in the mail fairly quickly. I have a feeling 2013 will be a wedding-heavy Spring/Summer for people.

We wanted our Save the Dates to look like "us," so we took a different approach than most Save the Dates I've seen. Instead of magnets or a huge picture of us, we found a way to harness the travel theme of our relationship (Skyping while I was in France, road tripping across the country, and our plans to live all around the world).

My amazingly talented little sister volunteers at a place where craft and art supplies are recycled and resold to the public. Among the old calendars, boxes of lint (seriously), and buttons, there are bins full of old postcards. Some have been used for correspondence, but most were purchased while someone was traveling, but then they purged it in a Spring cleaning or a move. My sister sifted through the bins until she found the number of postcards I needed, and bought them at a fraction of their original cost (and saved them from being thrown in a landfill).

The postcards (with origins from all over the world) were mailed to me (after quite an ordeal with address confusion), and I personalized them. We ordered stickers through Zazzle, using a photo from our engagement shoot. While I waited for the stickers to come in the mail, I found a stamp at Michael's and used gold (colored...not actual gold) ink to put a loving touch on the front of the postcards.

I was so excited when I finally put the Save the Dates in the mail. They were so "us," and will hopefully inspire others to take time to travel (to Oregon for our wedding!).