Save the Dates

I have been meaning to write about Save the Date cards for a while now, so here it goes. Save the Date cards are not common at all in Cyprus. It's such a small place and people are likely to see each other at some point or another well before the wedding date that there is no real need for them. In fact I have never seen a Save the Date card in Cyprus to be honest. So needless to say this was a new and interesting concept when I first delved into the world of wedding planning and invitations. A concept that actually become more and more appealing as I thought about.

Having lived abroad for many years, both Mr. Milk and I have close friends who we would like to have at our wedding but who are spread all over the world: the USA, Canada, UK, Italy, Saudi Arabia. In this day in age, tickets and travel have become very expensive. People are more selective about where they spend their money and rightly so. Since Cyprus is far away for a lot of our friends, we figured many of them might use our wedding as an excuse to plan a vacation to the Mediterranean. Giving them enough notice to do so became very important, taking into account that they will need tickets and hotels. This was our push to send Save the Dates.

I spent some time online looking at what was available, reading other people's blogs to see what they had done, and generally researching the cards. We decided that in order to save some money, and to be a little green, we would send out e-cards instead of printed ones. One day while looking through things on Wedding Wire (a great free website for those of you just starting this process) I saw that they had an update regarding Save the Dates. I followed their link and came across this great site. Pingg is a relatively new site that allows you to design and create unique invites for a variety of occassions. You can use pre-set designs/images or you can upload your own. They give you a bunch of options on how you can send your invite: via email, text, webpage, through social networking sites like facebook and twitter, or they will even print the invitations out for you and mail them (you pay for postage). Apart from the print and send option, the rest are free to use. They charge you for using some designs, but they have a large selection which are free to use. Their website is user friendly and has a nice, clean feel. I looked around for a bit and then decided that it would be unique to us if I used one of our engagement photos for the backdrop of the e-card. I chose this picture and kept the text simple.

I pre-empted the e-card with a short message letting people know that we would love it if they could make it to our wedding, and that we were sending these e-cards in an attempt to give them as much time as possible to plan their trip. I was able to pick colors for the background and font, and was actually very pleased with the result. Pingg has a variety of features available to you as the organizer and I think I will definitely use them again in the future for other invites. Unfortunately there is no way of posting an image of the final product (at least not one I could find), but that just means that you'll need to check the site out for yourselves!