DIY: Making our Save the Dates

Our boarding pass save the dates were a labor of love between our Maid of Honor, Nicki, and I. Sure, Drew poked his head in every once and again, but mainly he stayed out of our way; Like a good man should. :)

When I first saw the boarding pass invitations, doing searches on-line, I knew that I wanted to make my own. Instead of them being our invitations though, we opted instead to use them as our save the dates. Since we are having an Old Hawaii theme, we also knew we wanted the boarding passes to look vintage.

In order to make these I started searching all over for graphics with a vintage feel. The two places I have had the most luck finding these is Etsy and iStock. On Etsy, you can find a ton of vintage graphics that I think have been scanned in from old books.  iStock is full of stock photos and lots of vintage inspired retro graphics. They have both been able to provide us with many graphics that we have needed for all of our wedding paper.

I gathered all of my ideas and the graphics I liked and sent them all to Nicki.  She some how sorted through the huge mess and knew exactly what I wanted. She did an incredible job designing the boarding pass save the dates and the luggage tag magnets that went with them. Nicki sent me proofs of everything and Drew and I would go over them together to see if we wanted any changes or anything else that needed to be done. Once we had the final proofs, I printed everything up on our printer and Nicki came up on a Friday night to help me put everything together.

Now one of the good things about having a small destination wedding is that you can have lots of little touches because with their being so few people they won't cost you a bunch and if you are a DIY bride, like me, it won't take you as long to put everything together. Or so I thought; Just making 15 of them took HOURS.  I kid you not.

Nicki and I were at it for hours on that Friday night armed with red wine and cupcakes. We stayed at them until 1am and still weren't done. We also couldn't do anymore since we were both exhausted and crosseyed by that hour. Nicki went home and I finished them up over the weekend. I was so happy with the way they turned out. Let me know what you think.

Nicki is a bit of a perfectionist and doesn't trust paper cutters.  She cut all of the luggage tag magnets and boarding pass save the dates out by hand with an X-ACTO knife.  I love her for that! She wants you all to know that she did her own hair for this picture.

It took a lot of tools to get these babies done! A corner edger for the boarding passes, a  perforator to create the tear-off part of the boarding pass and a Crop-A-Dile.

I was pretty proud of myself once I figured out how to use the Crop-A-Dile and put the holes and eyelets into all of the luggage tag magnets that Nicki so perfectly cut out for me. 



Here's the completed luggage tags for our guests once I added the baker's twine and put magnet stripes on the back of them. Some guests received seahorses, while others got plumeria. They were both so great, I couldn't pick just one. 



Ok, there are actually four versions of the luggage tags, but we are the only ones who got the manilla and black ones.  That's all four of them on our actual fridge! Exciting, I know!

After Nicki cut out all of the boarding passes and luggage tags she started cutting out the slit for the boarding passes to go into their jackets and scored the ticket jackets to give them a good clean edge.  I sealed the inside of the ticket jacket down with a scarp booking tape once she was done. 

From left to right: The boarding passes before rounding the corners, the finished plumeria luggage tag magnets,  the ticket jackets and the seahorse luggage tags. 

When I first rounded the corners of the boarding passes, Drew didn't like it.  I had to pull the bride card and override him on that one though. The vintage boarding passes had rounded corners and ours were going to, too. Here's the finished product. I think the rounded edges came out really nice and give them a finished look.

The outside of the ticket jacket we printed up with "This Is Your Ticket to Paradise".  I think it gave it a fun added touch. I then placed a luggage tag magnet inside the top flap of the ticket jacket and wrapped the entire thing with baker's twine to create a belly band and also a vintage touch, like how packages used to be tied up with string. 

Once I was done with all of the boarding pass save the dates and had them all wrapped in twine I put them in glassine envelops so guests could see the "This Is Your Ticket to Paradise" right through them. If you'd like to see a few other pictures of them, including them in their envelops, you can view those on another post here. Lastly, I put them in the mail to be postmarked on 07.07.11; Exactly one year to our wedding day. I don't know if anyone noticed that little touch, but I knew it was there.

*All photos are from our personal collection*