DIY – Save the Date

Save the date is a fun and creative way to announce the big news to everyone and also kind of an advance notice to everyone to keep themselves free on that day (to make sure they don’t give lame excuses that “Oh! I did not know, we scheduled a vacation exactly that time and the tickets are already booked.” That too with a fake puppy face :P) before the official, formal invitations go out. So ya, that is the definition of “Save the date”.

Now this concept is quite new I guess and inspired from the west (wedding registry is one more concept I would love to see become popular here, I got 8 almost identical Radha-Krishna frames and a dozen Ganeshas and not to forget the recycled crockery sets and clocks :D). Anyway so once my wedding was fixed, I decided that I was going to go all the way and have a pre-wedding photo shoot as well as a save the date card. Plan was to do all lovey-dovey romantic poses for the pre-wedding shoot (it was just an excuse to click cute pictures :P). And for the save the date, I came up with the idea of going with “tying the knot” theme (internet inspiration *cough, cough*). The picture was clear in my mind; Puneeth (my guy) in blue jeans, white shirt tying a red tie and me in blue jeans, white shirt and red shoes acting cute :D (this by the way is my original idea and I plan to copyright it :P). We coaxed one of our friends (thank you Jayanth J) to be the photographer and the pre-wedding shoot went in a flurry of hysterical giggling by me and exasperated sighs by my guy (you see I suffer from a very bad case of Chandler’s camera effect; hint: F.R.I.E.N.D.S). But at the end of the day we managed to shoot a few decent shots and wrapped up, postponing the save the date image to a later date. But that never happened, we never got the time to do that shoot again and we had to pick some photo from the pre-wedding shoot for the save the date as well. The problem now was that the pre-wedding shoot photos were not meant for others as in I am sure our parents did not want our relatives and friends getting our romantic photo card in their inboxes. And I even had plans to blow up the save the date card and display it in our engagement hall :D. So bottom line, we could not use any of our pre-wedding shoot photos for save the date and I almost scrapped the whole plan to even have a save the date when Puneeth came to my rescue (like a knight in shining armor *sigh*) and he and his friend Sada brilliantly cropped one of the pre-wedding shoot photo and came up with this movie poster style save the date image that I was swept off my feet yet again  (it was way different from what I had in my mind but so much better and special because he made it  J). So that was my loooooong story about my save the date card. It is really easy to make it, there are a lot of templates and inspirations available on the net. So just bug a friend to take a few photos and photoshop it, add some snazzy text, witty one liners etc and announce to the world in style (in case you use your photos, it also satisfies those curious relatives who would be wondering how the guy/girl looks :P)

Here are a few ideas from the net that you can toy around with to create one for your own wedding:

1. Use fun props

2. Use banners/boards creatively

3. Include your pet!

4. Unleash your creativity

5. Go retro!

6. Do the shoot at an exotic location

7. Photoshop real hoardings

8. Take the funny route

9. Create caricatures

10. Use DIY templates available online

11. Just use funky text. Very useful if your partner is in another city or plain busy :P

12. Good old candid

13. Movie poster style (mine was on a similar theme though much more simple :))

Image Sources: Google images