Welcome back to Let’s Cut the Cake!

This is our newest series on AJ and I planning our own wedding as a pair of wedding photographers! Over the next 9 months, we’ll be sharing our process and inviting you in on our decision making and witnessing trial + errors!

It’s called Let’s Cut the Cake because that’s what AJ and I will be doing on May 16th, 2020!!

Can’t wait to have you all along on this crazy long, messy path that is actually planning a wedding.

We are officially off our summer hiatus and ready to jump back into wedding planning! You can expect weekly posts again every Wednesday here on the blog!

Using Minted Postcards for our Save the Dates

We decided to go with Minted after talking to our wonderful planner Ashley from Much Ado Austin! She suggested Minted for the save the dates because they were easy, affordable, and we could get them out quick! 

We’ll definitely do something more involved for our invitations, and hopefully get to work with another local vendor! But for right now, we wanted something quick, inexpensive, and relatively easy! 

First, I’ll talk about what it was like working in Minted’s design space and choosing our Save the Date template!

Then, I want to share about how we chose the photo we did. Obviously this was a hard decision, and this one means so much to me ! 

Letters vs Postcards

This was by far the best decision we could have made when creating our Save the Dates in Minted! I believe that postcards are a fairly new offering in Minted, but I’m so happy we stumbled upon them!

The way that I was looking at Save the Dates is an introduction to wedding day. As someone who sees a lot of weddings 🙂 the ~vibe~ of it all is something really important to me. A postcard really fit the vision of something laid back and fun!

The templates on Minted are super cute and range in colors, fonts, photo vs no photo. Basically anything you can imagine, they have a super cute template for you! 

Designing it is super simple too! Most designs have multiple colors for you to swap in and out. Everything else is just drag and drop, which is awesome! You just type in your names, your date, your location if it’s on the card. 

And can have multiple designs saved if you want to have a few options to look into. Once you decide on the design you love, you can get it looked over by a designer for free!

For example, AJ and I’s last names are super long so we needed our names re-centered on the card and some things shifted to be perfect. We got to fully approve once the designer was done, and the printing began!

Here is maybe the best part:

With postcards, the recipient address goes directly to the right of the back page. Minted will print each recipient onto the postcard for you!! 

Not having to buy additional envelopes saved us a ton of money! Plus it’s less paper – better for the environment!!

That means all you need to do is slap a stamp on the back (which, by the way postcard stamps are cheaper than regular ones!!) and put them in your mailbox! 

Pretty life changing, right?

You do have to upload a spreadsheet of all your guests and their addresses into Minted. But guess what, you should already have that! 🙂 And if you or your planner (shoutout to Ashley for yet again, being amazing) uses Aisle Planner, you can use the same spreadsheet for that!

Minted gives you a free wedding website too

Every couple needs a wedding website nowadays. It’s gotta be simple enough for your older guests, personal enough to tell your love story, and if it were easy to set up, that’s even better!

Minted gives you a free wedding website that matches your save the dates. You can upgrade the website for $20 to get more features. We found a promo code via Honey and got it upgraded for free!

With the upgrade you can upload as many photos as you want, have multiple locations listed (for rehearsal dinner, etc.) and get a custom url! Ours is our nickname, coined by my brother and his girlfriend: hay-jay.com! You can take a peek at it to see how perfect the design is! 

Remember that spreadsheet of the guests? 

Once you upload the addresses, they’ll also be in the system connected to your Minted account. So your guests can head over to your cute wedding website and RSVP directly there! 

Let’s Talk The Photos

I was kind of nervous to get our Save the Dates because we have so many amazing pictures together! Not even just from the last few years (ya know, the surprise proposal and then flying to D.C.!) but I’m in love with all of our photos from high school and college especially. 

I knew it was gonna be tough to pick just one to be the to be the front image of her wedding day.

Definitely after taking so many beautiful photos together since we started our photography career, and we have even more from the previous six years of us being together. There are just so many good times that I even love those pictures from back in high school even more than the professional ones that we’ve taken lately.

The main thing I wanted to convey was excitement because this has been a seriously long time coming. I didn’t want to just feel like another save the date that goes up on your fridge (which, I’m not gonna flatter myself, that’s where all the save the dates end up!) I wanted it to feel like: 

This is going to be nine years in the making. It’s a really big deal that we have made it to this point, and it’s so important with us that you come celebrate that with us! 

So with that in mind I picked a photo from when AJ proposed. I think this photo in particular has a lot of potential energy, like a lot of anticipation and a lot of genuine excitement.

There’s the surprise of the champagne bottle popping, and in this moment are still running pretty high on adrenaline. I think there’s kind of like a shock in this photo and our faces and everything.

It perfectly encapsulates how I feel about our wedding day. Because I am in shocked and I’m excited and I’m running on adrenaline and I’m so head over heels in love. I am stoked for the wedding day to come and I’m equally stoked for our guests to come and celebrate with us!

I really think that this picture perfectly portrays that and I hope that when seeing it that our guests will also feel that excitement. Because I want them to be really excited to celebrate with us! Because it’s going to be a good time 🙂 🙂 

You can see all of Minted Save the Dates here!