Piratey "save the dates" are floating ashore!

OBT member Sandy and her partner made these amazing Save The Dates. They're planning a pirate wedding and they wanted their STDs to convey the pirate wedding theme to guests early on. I think these messages in bottle topped with jolly roger wax seals do a pretty damn good job of that…

For the maps, I did a print screen of the San Diego area in Google Maps and traced over it in a transparent layer in Adobe Illustrator - then deleted the original map, used a bunch of filters, and added the border, gridlines and location names. The X roughly marks the spot of the wedding/reception location. The compass rose was clip art. I scoured the web for pirate fonts until I found ones we liked.

We bought all our materials online. Here's some vendor info for anyone looking for referrals (we were really happy with everyone we ordered from):

• The paper was parchment from Discount Office Items.
• If you have any need for bottles, check out SKS Bottle and Packaging — they've got every variety you could ever need (ours were plastic and came with the corks). 
• Nostalgic Impressions sells a ton of sealing wax and seal stamps (we've also ordered gorgeous feather pens from them for the guest book and for signing our domestic partnership agreement).
• The ribbon is from The Ribbon Jar.

We ended up hand delivering to coworkers and local family members to cut back on costs.

We mailed them as-is (just stuck translucent mailing labels and regular stamps to their sides and brought them to the post office). Mailing them came out a little pricier than we'd originally anticipated — $1.39 each. We ended up hand delivering to coworkers and local family members to cut back on costs. We've spoken to several guests who all got theirs the third day after we mailed them, and the wax arrived intact. I can't believe how well they shipped!