Halloween Wedding Wednesday-Save the Date

Today we start with the Save the Date!  A save the date is important for a Halloween wedding, especially if you are doing it the weekend of Halloween, because others might schedule Halloween parties. So getting out the save the date a good five months in advance is a must! I think we just barely missed the 5 months mark but that is because we wanted to use a picture from our engagement photo session on it and of course I did not schedule the photo session enough in advance!

We had an idea of what we wanted for our save the date and told the photographer and we tried a bunch of pictures at our engagement session to nail down what we wanted. As I stated in my engagement photos post, it is all trial and error. Unfortunately what we had tried and had as our idea, did not translate for us in the photos. It was just not what we were looking for.

These are the first try....does not fit our theme

This is part of what helped us realize that we like smiling...

Luckily, we had the worlds greatest photographers and when she heard this, she agreed to do another session, completely free, to get that exact picture and look we wanted. And when we showed up she had tons of new ideas and ways to do the pose so we could be sure to find exactly the photo we wanted. And you know what? It worked! We found it and our save the date could not have been more awesome!

This is it!

This finally hit the nail on the head! This fit our theme...fun Halloween. This was campy, old horror movie style. And it worked perfectly for what we wanted. The final save the date looked like this!

You can see the addition of fangs on this one.....and yes we
did require people to wear costumes...more on that to come

We had these printed onto magnets using Vistaprint. The fonts we used were Blood of Dracula (save the date), Grapefruit (formal invitation to follow [that link will lead you to what the font looks like, but I had it in my Microsoft Office...it came with it]), and Decadenta Frax (everything else). By making it ourselves, we were able to include a skull (gotta have skulls!) and the cutest little heart spider...because I love hearts and sparkles and things.

We also had an accompaniment to the save the date printed on cardstock to give all the major details, like hotels, events, etc since the magnet had limited space. If you want to see that, send me a private message. Most of the info is not something that should probably be posted on the internet but if you would like the general idea of the theme and how I put it together, I would be happy to send it out personally.

What do you think of the save the date? Did it capture our message?

Halloween Wedding Wednesday-Engagement Photos

Today I am starting a new series called Wedding Wednesday!  As my readers might know, I had a Halloween themed wedding on October 29, 2011. A LOT  of it was DIY. I remember how hard it was to find good resources on ideas for Halloween weddings so in response to a few emails, I thought I would do a series where I highlight some of what was done. I will attempt to go in order...from the beginning to the end.

First up we have engagement photos. These are photos you might use for your wedding website, save the date, wedding decorations, around the house, etc. But to be sure, you will use them at least at some point for your wedding. So it is important to set the tone from the very beginning. Our tone was---Halloween! But we were doing fun, campy Halloween...not evil scary. So we did our engagement photos in a graveyard but with lots of smiles and fun. Here are some of them to give you an idea.

It is a good idea to ask your photographer to add some cool filters when they are fixing the photos. You can see some filters in use in these photos.

My husband and I were both gymnasts...we met 10 years ago coaching gymnastics! I was in heels so I couldn't do the same thing as him...I'm amazed my heels didn't stick in the grass

Make sure you check ahead of time for permits or requirements for photographing in a cemetery.  We found that one cemetery we wanted in Redondo Beach wanted $1400 for even just a one hour session! Also Hollywood Cemetery wanted $400 for an hour. Just make sure you check into those things so you are not breaking any rules.

The good thing about having an engagement session is learning about what pictures you like best. We took all kinds of pictures. But when we got the proofs, we could see that serious style pictures were not for us. We preferred the ones where we were smiling and we were able to translate that to optimize our wedding pictures.

I love how cool this photo turned out

same heels I wore to Promaballoona!

This is my favorite photo of all of them and my favorite filter...it makes us kind of look like ghosts!

Lastly, I want you to know who my amazing photographers were. We used Karen Leah Photography. We researched a lot of blogs and styles before deciding on them. And they were fantastic! Truly amazing...wait until I show you some of the wedding photos. We HIGHLY recommend them.

You can check out a sneak peek of things to come by looking at her blog post of our wedding.

I hope this helps get the ball rolling with some inspiration.