Equipment: Dremel, Airbrush, Printer, Silhouette Cameo

Supplies: Airbrush paint, drill bit, potatoes, printer paper, double sided tape, sticker paper.

Challenge / Purpose: Create buildable Save the Date favours

Process: We pushed ourselvesto rethink what a Save the Date was. Rather than getting a piece of paper in the mail that gets tacked to the fridge or forgotten about, we wanted to create a Save the Date that would engage the (and confuse) the receiver for a short period of time, while still reflecting the whimsical nature of our wedding day. There is no better way to do this than to bring people back to their childhoods via LEGO.

Thus, we purchased a number of the Bride Groom LEGO sets (#40165, available here, however they have changed the design a bit: https://shop.lego.com/en-CA/Wedding-Favour-Set-2016-40165), but because the bride’s hair didn’t match mine, we went on BrickLink and bought a number of the short bob haircut pieces (#62711 http://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=62711#T=C). We then went about drilling holes in their heads to hold the veils and crown that came with the sets at the time and also airbrushed the red hair brown. As the LEGO hair was very small and hard to hold, we put each hair piece on a toothpick and stuck all the tooth picks into a potato.

Once we had the LEGO pieces looking how we wanted, we went to work modifying the LEGO instructions that came with the set to reflect the paper banner that would drape across the top of the wedding arch that came in the set. High resolution images that we took with our camera, a little Photoshop, and sticker paper, allowed us to seamlessly change the instructions to match the new assembly steps. The banners were designed and cut out using the Silhouette Cameo. we stuck double sided tape squares to the banners to allow our attendees to easily attach the banner to the arch. Next, we tested out, and cut, a number of vinyl letters to go along the bottom of the LEGO bases to identify who was getting married (as all invitations were anonymously sent in the mail or dropped in mailboxes). To finish up the Save the Dates, we added small speech bubbles to the outside of the boxes with a cryptic message about ‘save’ and ‘date’ using computer icons!

The last thing we did was wrap the LEGO boxes in some old Walt Disney World park maps – a subtle hint to where our wedding would be taking place.