Wedding Wednesday//Guest List and Save The Dates

We sent in our Rental Agreement Form with Tlaquepaque and now we are waiting to hear back from them to make it official. In between getting in contact with caterers and figuring that situation out, I have been putting the final touches on our guest list. It has been in a "wish list" type format for several months now. We have whittled it down to who we absolutely most definitely want to share that day with!
This has been one of the hardest things to do thus far. It has been the biggest juggling act of parents wishes, and our wishes and keeping within the number set by the fire code. It took some discussing, and we had to make some hard decisions. We both made compromises. Looking at numbers, 100 people seems like a lot but when you put names to those numbers, it really isn't very many people at all!
Instead of trying to write down everyone's names and all the people that might be in a family or dates and such, I used a Google Docs Spreadsheet. It was the easiest thing ever! I made five main columns and also two small columns between each so that I could note how many guests for that person/family and whether we were sending a Save the Date. I unfortunately used STD for the notation without really thinking about it. I promise, to my knowledge, our family and friends are clean people! We dumped everyone we could think of into their respective categories, color coded, and edited until we got a solid list. I also added a function to the whole spreadsheet so that we ended up with a grand total in one of the cells. It made the hardest part a little bit easier!

Since the venue is pretty much booked, The finalized guest list was needed so we can send out our Save the Dates. We have come up with a few designs based on what we liked and that I talked about back in November. We picked all of these together and just recently made the decision which to go with and now we are waiting for production to finish. All three are post card style and will be sent out as such. We are printing with Shutterfly as 4x6in prints which will cut down our costs.

Like I have mentioned previously, once they arrive at their destinations, I will share what we picked and the details and elements in them that we liked and/or added. But for now, the winner is one of these three designs:


The first is the one that is closest to the ones I posted about back in December. I did the whole thing in PhotoShop. Originally, we were planning on printing this design on a Kraft colored cardstock from Michaels. They have clearanced it all out and there wasn't enough for what we wanted to do. We even had trial runs done. Home printing all of that raspberry color onto brown paper was just too much ink as well. It was very muted too. This is why we nixed the home printing and are going with Shutterfly. This is my favorite, but BK wanted to see some other ideas.
This one is a free download from WeddingChicks.com. You enter in you information and it spits out an image for you to download and print. I love the bracket and mason jar details. I am not a huge fan of the color offerings so I fixed it up a little bit and still might play around some more with the coloring. I also having a little bit of a problem with the missing 'and' between our names. If we choose that one it will need the text fixed as well.
Last but not least we have this vertical style one. It is somewhat of a hybrid between the two above. This would be the front and the back of the postcard would have all of the important details that you put on a Save The Date. The first and third are my favorite. But Berke had a say in this too.

To see which we chose, either be on the lookout for your copy in the mail, or check back in a few weeks. Also with our Save the Date order is our little "Be in our wedding party" information packets! I'll talk about that more next week and show a little sneak peak on what got sent with those as well.