Many people have asked how we made our birth announcements. We’re delighted to tell you because not only did we custom design them ourselves but it ended up being far cheaper than if we had used a pre-made design at somewhere like Wal-mart or Target. We decided to go with postcards instead of cards mailed in envelopes in order to take advantage of the Post Office’s cheaper postcard rate of  28 cents as opposed to the standard 44 cent rate for regular mail. When you’re sending out 100 birth announcements, the savings is obvious: $28 vs. $44. Secondly, we were able to get 100 postcards printed by an online printer (OvernightPrints.com) for around $30 as opposed to the announcements printed by Wal-mart or Target for between 40 cents and $1 each. Thus by mailing out postcards to announce the birth of our gorgeous Poppy we easily spent half as much as we could have with “birth announcements” from Wal-mart or Target.

You may now be thinking, “Yeh, you got them printed and posted cheaper but how much did it cost to design them? Didn’t you have to have some fancy-smancy, professional photo editing software?” No! Emily snapped a candid photo of Poppy and me with our Nikon D40 and then we edited it using the incredible free web application Picnik.com like PicMonkey.com. Really the editing, customization, and modification of your photos using Picnik is dead easy. Scale your image to fit a postcard (this was the trickiest part of the whole process, but not impossible). Find effects you like, click it and boom you got it. Add text. Export. Send to your online printer and in a couple of days you’re ready to start addressing postcards (note that there’s a template that you have to follow when writing and addressing postcards).

That’s basically it. We know a lot of couples who are having babies in the next year or so. We expect to be receiving beautiful custom-made postcards from you!