It's Gonna Be a Far Out Party, Man!

One of the biggest things going on in my life right now (besides launching my debut book and writing others) is planning my 2013 wedding.

As you may or may not know, I love throwing parties. Specifically theme parties (by way of example: my Tridecade Tournament, my 90s Prom, or my murder mystery birthday). And I consider the wedding the biggest theme party of all!

I've been using wedding planning as a stress relief for when book stuff is getting to me. This may sound odd, especially when I know that wedding planning is what actually stresses most people out, but the thing is: I can control most aspects of wedding planning (whereas I can control very few aspects of marketing a book). AND after writing a whole three-task Tridecade Tournament and figuring out how to turn my living room into the Great Hall (complete with floating candles)...this is kinda on the easy side.

The fiance and I have some tricks up our sleeves for our wedding guests, but one of the things we just recently sent out was our save-the-dates. And I've been so proud of them that I thought I'd share them here (oh, okay, I'm also running out of things to blog about, people! There's only so much excitement in a lowly author's life).

I actually had the idea for the save-the-dates a looooong time ago. Graig and I both love the 60s and the design idea just came to me during a car ride one day: psychedelic 60s concert posters.

Graig, being a huge Deadhead, was not hard to convince on this matter.

We flipped through some books and took our inspiration from these two specific posters:

(So the Grateful Dead was actually involved. Graig was happy).

Using a combination of hand-lettering (all Graig) and some Photoshop/design skillz (a joint effort) our final result was a two-sided postcard that had this on one side:

And this on the other:

And then, of course, we needed some funky, trippy envelope to house the whole thing.

Behold!

Translucent and turquoise with the stamp as a pop of color.

In case you can't tell, we really love our save-the-dates and how they turned out. AND I found our fantastic printers (nextdayflyers.com) solely from author word-of-mouth. They do beautiful bookmarks too! (And you know how we authors love our swag).

Now...on to the invitations...