Right before I started grad school, I somehow stumbled upon this fun little website called Wordle. It's this nifty free site where you enter in/copy & paste the text and then it creates a word cloud for you. I had tons of free credit at Shutterfly, so I decided to make a poster of our wedding vows.
I essentially copy and pasted the text from our wedding and then it spit back a design. The cool thing about Wordle is you can personalize the word cloud-- change the colors, the shape, font, etc so you can really make it whatever you want. They decide the sizes of the words based on the frequency it appears in the text. Here are some of the mock-ups I made before deciding on the final one:
Matt and I picked the last one you see, uploaded it to Shutterfly, and had them print it out poster-size. The resolution of the upload wasn't perfect. For instance, if it was a picture we had printed at that size, it would look horrible. However, for the text, it looked great! Here's the final product hanging above our bed!
I promise I am not getting paid for this by Wordle or Shutterfly. It was just a fun, cheap little project I did and we really like how it turned out. It's cool to see the words that were the most prominent in our wedding vows on a daily basis :)
[This is the first of my wedding recaps. Stay tuned in the next several weeks for the rest!]
There were several things we decided to do-it-ourselves, some of which were more labor intensive than others.
Though we didn't exactly /make/ our invites, we had to put the set together and print the addresses. Ask my mom-- that was quite an ordeal! See the invites here: click me!
We also did the same thing for the Save-the-Dates, though much less stuffing was involved.
A week before the wedding, I went to a good friend's wedding and they had these great little cards for a Shutterfly website they created where the guests can easily upload the pictures from the wedding onto the website. Then the guests as well as the newlyweds can get a larger variety of pictures. We thought this was a really good idea so we created our on website (IT'S FREE!) thru shutterfly, made it password protected, and then printed out little business cards with the URL and password. [And sorry-- I can't find a picture of them right now... :(]
We also DIY'e
d our wedding programs!! This was quite easy- we found some decently heavy card stock from a local office store, found a free and easy template online, and boom- we were done. Sorry for the blurriness in the picture-- protection and all.
