DIY OBX Wedding Save the Dates

So, we picked OBX for our wedding destination – now we had to tell everyone about it!

While we have several wonderful friends’ save-the-dates on our fridge with their smiling faces, we knew we didn’t want our faces on someone’s fridge. But we did like the magnet trend as a handy reminder about our wedding.

Does this look familiar? Surely if you live anywhere along the east coast, or anywhere in Pennsylvania (Seriously, its like Pittsburgh empties out onto the Outer Banks every summer!) you’ve been behind someone with the iconic OBX decal on their car. Which gave us an idea…. which had already been thought of by Jerry & Emily for their OBX Wedding. Great minds think alike though, right? And so the OBX Car magnet save-the-date was born.

Emily and Jerry went all in on their DIY, printing and cutting them all by hand. GO THEM. I didn’t have that kinda time and instead opted to use a printer for ours. I selected CMagnets as their prices weren’t too bad and we could order a quantity that was less than 500.

Using CMagnet’s downloadable template and photoshop, I quickly whipped up our design, deciding to keep our names informal on the Save-the-date and included our date and the village we were getting married in. Once I was happy with the design, I rasterized the text and flattened it for printing approval. The whole process using CMagnets was really easy and they arrived quickly. after which point we immediately covered our fridge in them! 😉

But, the magnets can’t just be put in the mail. There are tons of horror stories of folks never getting their save-the-date because the magnet was too powerful and just clung to the inside of a mailbox somewhere, lost forever. So we knew we were going to have to mail them in an envelope with a card to prevent that from happening. I quickly got to work designing a 2-sided 5×7 flat card to share more info and protect the magnet in the mail.

When we were last in OBX, I took a moment to snap a few photos of our initials in the sand. Then I edited them into the waterline photo for the front of the card. The back featured chevron – my favorite! – and the basic details our guests would need. Once I was settled with the design, Bill’s Best Man printed them for us at his office for free (THANKS AGAIN!) which was a handy way to offset the cost of the magnets.

Once printed it was time to stuff them into envelopes and pop them into the mail!

OBX Car Magnet Save The Date for Outer Banks Wedding

I really liked how the Magnet sort of looks like a surf board stuck into the sand this way – a happy coincidence!

We had zero guests NOT get their save-the-date delivered to them, so the simple cardstock was enough to prevent that — and guests were able to keep them on their fridge, or pop them on their bumpers too if they wished.

Now, we only needed about 60 magnets — so there may have been someone magnetically tagging vehicles in the parking lot on our wedding day with all the extras. Oops! 😉