Your Wedding Stationary

To recap everything we've done so far:

• Shiny rock on finger? Check.
• Established your venue and wedding date.
• Determined the feel of your wedding.
• Taken your engagement pictures.
• Interviewed vendors for different aspects of your wedding.

Pat yourself on the back! These are huge decisions to get out of the way! The sooner these ducks are in a row, the sooner you can start in on the nitty gritty details. WARNING: the nitty gritty details is what starts to feel overwhelming, so lets pace ourselves, shall we?

Lets talk about stationary. According to Martha (stop judging!), Save the Dates should go out 6 months before the wedding, and invitations should go out 3 months before. 

You have a lot of options with Save the Dates. What is really comes down to is how much you want to spend.  ALWAYS REMEMBER POSTAGE! This will not be the last time I tell you this.

I thought we would save some money by doing postcards. The postage on a postcard is about 10 cents cheaper than regular mail. 10 cents times 70 postcards is $7. In the grand scheme of things, not worth my headache! The postcard stamps were ugly Hawaiian tee shirts, so we just bought the 45 cent stamps anyways. And when the postage people ran the postcards through their machine, a weird green smudge ended up on Hubby's forehead. The one pro- I didn't need to stuff any envelopes. Not a big enough pro to counteract those cons.

Our save the date postcards.

Times when postcards are appropriate: travel themed weddings; vintage themed weddings, when you aren't using a picture of your face as the postcard.

But we did postcards. Remember what I said about a cohesive wedding experience? We kept the wording on the save the dates simple, but classic. Switched up the fonts to be different but classy. And we kept it modern by adding the website in there. According to Martha, websites are kosher now-a-days. I printed the addresses directly onto the postcards. Yay for no handwriting! (As a left handed person- writing neatly isn't an option. My pinky smudges everything I write!)

We printed our Save the Dates on Vistaprint.com. I bought a Groupon, paying $45 for $70 worth of printing. Worked like a charm. Vistaprint also has very good customer service. If you see a template you like, but don't see it in the color you want, just hit that chat button, they will tell you what other colors are available.

Next thing you know, time for invitations. Hopefully you've taken care of any address bounce backs with your Save the Dates. This was one of the first decisions that had me in shambles. THIS was the first taste guests get of your wedding. Hubby can probably attest that living with me through this was painful.

I was all for DIY-ing this step. I was looking into a paper cutter, paper folding techniques, you name it. But let me share a piece of advice Tina shared with me, and many friends have reiterated since then. It's totally not worth it. Any type of savings you may come up with is NOT worth the time it takes to put those damn things together.

But I will also say, paying a fancy invitation company an arm and a leg for your invitations isn't an option when you are on a budget. So what's the happy in between?

Now don't cringe. You know those invitation packages on the shelves in Michaels, AC Moore, even Walmart? Yep. That's what we used. They come with a template in Microsoft Word and everything. All you need is a decent printer. Ours was a mid-priced printer we bought at WalMart, and it did the job beautifully. We bought our invitation packages at Michaels when they were having a 30% off sale on stationary, and I had a 20% off your entire purchase coupon.

We used a tri-fold invitation card

Things to look for to ensure you don't create a cheap looking product: heavier paper weight; embossed finish versus flat printed finish; high quality of the printing and details. The embossing on our invite was a simple vine detail (cohesive with the vineyard theme...).

Detail of the trifold exterior. 

The original package came with a white ribbon to wrap around the invitation. I needed some color and pizzazz. So I bought green ribbon (that matched the ribbon we used in the rest of the wedding details), and had my MOH cut the ribbon the same length. (the ribbon is not pictured here. Sorry.)

The wording on our invitations

 The most important thing to remember is wording. I spent HOURS trying to find the right wording for our invitations. Hubby and I were hosting ourselves. We have been together over 6 years at that point. We already owned a house together. So we decided on the following:

"Your Love and Friendship has helped us become who we are
Brianna Mahan and Derek Green
Invite you to share in Joy and Love as best friends become Husband and Wife"

Other rules I broke- I included the zip code of the Vineyard. Last thing I needed was people calling me left and right asking how to get to the damn place. I also used the Oxford comma in the "Dancing, Food, and Fun Immediately After", to the chagrin of my public relations maid of honor (tee hee). My maid of honor had me change the date to May 3, 2013, instead of the digital format shown- which I'm very glad I did. Another rule I broke- I didn't write out the date. It's the 21st Century, I'm calling shenanigans on that tradition. Finally, I printed the addresses on the invitations instead of handwriting them. GASP!

Now, it's not like I took Comic Sans and printed the envelopes. Have you ever heard of dafont.com? 4 hours. 4 hours of searching for the most perfect calligraphy font. Test page after test page of fonts. But I found it. And I mastered the mail merge like nobody's business. I also printed the return address on the back side of the envelope. And no one had a heart attack. The wedding gods didn't spite our wedding or our marriage.

If I could do it different, I would have spent the extra money and done those refrigerator magnets for the Save the Dates. But se la vie. I loved our invitations. Don't get me wrong, they still took a damn long time to put together, but I think they set the stage perfectly.

In all, we paid approximately $45 for all our invitations. $45 for the Save the Dates and other stationary I bought with the Groupon. $35 for the Save the Date postage, $35 for the RSVP postage, and $50 for invitation postage. Yes, $100 in postage for 125 invited guests. Remember postage!

Final tidbits of information:

• Remember, you have the postage for the RSVP envelopes, AND the postage for the actual invite. 
• Put one whole invite together and have the post office weigh it! 
• You can hand cancel your invitations at the post office, so they don't get dirty going through the postage machines. We live in a small town, and they didn't have the man power to do it there. So I did it. They put me on the end of the counter, gave me the stamp, and I went at it. 
• Send an invite to the President, you'll get a neat postcard back. 
• Buy extra stationary. We bought almost an entire package extra. And it was worth it. Some of the stationary wasn't printed perfectly straight, so I didn't use it. I was also able to ensure spacing was perfect. 

Finally, it's your wedding. Have your stationary represent who you are. Oh, and:

If you get the reference, 1,000 points to Gryffindor.