If you’ve been trolling Pinterest lately, you know that wedding invitations are big business and that the right invitation sets the perfect tone for your special day. If you’re like most brides, though, you probably didn’t give much thought to your invitations until you got engaged. That doesn’t mean you can skimp on this important detail, though. Your invitations are your guests’ first introduction to your nuptial ceremony, and they’re the last thing you want to get wrong.
An Option for Every Budget
You have three choices when it comes to your invitations:
- Doing it yourself – This requires you to make your invitations from scratch, minus the paper itself, but affords you plenty of room for creativity. It’s also the cheapest option, but will take up significantly more time.
- Doing it partially yourself – Craft stores such as Michael’s now offer custom-made invitations that you assemble yourself. You can also stamp or add other embellishments to these invites to render them uniquely your own. It costs a little more than doing it yourself, but you’ll spend far less than you would if you had a printer make your invites for you.
- The letterpress option – For the most glamorous invitations, you can’t beat a letterpress. These invites are by far the most expensive, but you can often score a deal by getting unpopular colors, choosing a small unknown artist, or waiting for out-of-season paper to go on sale.
Choosing Your Design
The sky is the limit when it comes to choosing your invitation design, so don’t be afraid to be creative. Following these tips, though, can help you direct your creative energies:
- Pick something that conveys how formal or informal your wedding will be. A photo of a beach, for example, has no place on an invitation to a white tie wedding.
- Choose invitation colors that complement or match your wedding colors.
- Choose something relatively simple, not something over-the-top, which can look dated in a few years.
- Try invitations with pockets and cards for a more put-together, glamorous look.
Basic Invitation Rules
As with everything else wedding-related, you need to follow some basic etiquette rules when you design your invitation:
- Never, ever put a gift registry on your invitation. Instead, only add information that guests need to make it to your wedding.
- Send invitations out at least six weeks in advance – earlier if you’re not using save-the-date cards.
- Hand-address your invitations, and be sure you spell everyone’s names correctly and use the right names. For example, if your friend kept her name after getting married, don’t address her as Mrs. HusbandsLastName.
- There are no longer any hard and fast rules for invitation wording, so pick something that resonates with you and clearly conveys key information about your wedding.
- Keep a running tally of who has RSVP’d, and start calling unresponsive guests immediately after the RSVP deadline has passed.
Your invitations can quickly become the most time-consuming part of your wedding, but there’s nothing more exciting than seeing those RSVP cards come in as you look forward to your big day.