Yay for STDs -- Part III

Ok kids. I've left you waiting for long enough. It's time to show you our STDs.

Remember, we wanted the front of our STDs to have an image of our hands... so we set about having a little photoshoot of our lovely digits. Of course, we were kind of dumb, and didn't plan this out very well. We had no one to snap the pictures for us, so we decided to just prop our camera up on a shelf, and use the self-shoot mode for our pictures. We also wanted a black backdrop, but had nothing resembling a black sheet in our house, so we decided to improvise instead. We draped one of the Architect's black blazers over a folding wooden chair, et voila! Instant backdrop. The only problem was that the backdrop wasn't really big enough. All of this led to some pretty silly attempts at taking photos of our hands. Wanna see?

Attempt #1 --
Not too bad, but our hands are really off center in this shot. This is one of the many problems that we ran into thanks to not finding a friend to be our photographer for the day.

Attempt #2 --
Eek! I didn't know I could contort my wrist like that! I think this is one of the pictures where the Architect grabbed my hand saying, "No! Hold your hand like this" right as the camera decided it was time to take a picture.

Sometime in the middle of our "photo shoot" I may have fallen over on the floor laughing so hard that I was crying (and maybe almost peed on myself). The Architect was just getting so frustrated with the process of taking our own pictures, and the camera kept going off at the most inopportune moments. Really, though, I just wanted to show you our setup in this picture. To the right of that uncontrollably laughing girl, you can see the chair with the blazer draped over it -- our wonderful makeshift backdrop.

Attempt #952 --
Ok... getting a little better. My wrist is still bent in a pretty unnatural way, and we placed our hands too high, so that you can see right over our backdrop in this picture. But, we're getting there.

Attempt #1004 --
Finally. Perfection. Almost. Nothing a little Photoshop couldn't fix.

So after about an hour of taking self-shots of our hands, and a little bit of that special magic called Photoshop, courtesy of the Architect, enter our STDs!

Postcard front

Postcard back --
Actually, this one is a little different from the postcard back that we ultimately went with. This is the version that we designed in iPhoto. When we decided to go with MOO in the end, we had to sacrifice the use of different font sizes, so "We're getting married" appears in smaller text on our actual STDs.

The Architect painstakingly addressed each and every one of our STDs by hand. Being an architect, he has excellent handwriting -- way better than mine -- so I was off the hook for this task. Once the cards were all addressed, we threw a little return address sticker onto each of them (we printed these with our handy-dandy label maker -- pretty much the only "crafting" tool that I own, if you can even count it as such). Then it was off to the post office, and our cards were off to their many destinations covering a multitude of states and 5 different countries -- the U.S.A., Canada, Japan, Sweden, and Singapore.

This is what our dining room table looked like over the several days that it took the Architect to address all of our STDs. Ok, actually, at times it looked A LOT messier than this, but that's our little secret, right?

Our pile of STDs, all addressed and ready to go. Mission accomplished... only 3 weeks later than originally planned. It pains me to cover up the Architect's impeccable handwriting here, but I'm sure our guests would prefer that their addresses not be plastered all over the internet.

Did you design postcard STDs? How did yours come out in the end?