Wedding Invitations: Tips & Tricks

In honour of Valentine's Day, I thought it would be fitting to kick off my wedding recap series on the blog. We've been married for 4 months as of yesterday and it's been so wonderful looking at all our photos and reliving the day. Funny how a whole year of planning can be over in such a flash!

Credit: Sara Rogers Photography

As part of this series, I'm planning on sharing some details from our special day and things I learned along the way. First up, invitations!

SAVE THE DATES

For our wedding, sending out Save the Dates was necessary as we had a lot of guests who would have to travel. This way, they were given a lot of advance notice to block off the time in their calendars if they planned on coming. We opted to send ours through e-mail via Paperless Post, which I highly recommend because it was free (tip: the default option requires you to buy coins for fancy "envelopes" but I did away with "envelopes" altogether since these weren't our actual invitations thus making the cost zero).

In addition to alerting people to the date and location of our wedding, we also used the Save The Dates as a way of gathering our guests' mailing addresses. Paperless Post lets you track who's opened your card, which is helpful so you know who to follow up with. They have a lot of wedding invitation designs as well so you could do everything through them for free/cheap and in an eco-friendly way.

INVITATIONS

We had initially planned on using Minted for our wedding invitations because that's the platform we were using for our wedding website and online RSVPs. Side note: I tried a number of different options for our wedding website before I settled on Minted; ultimately I liked that we could manage our RSVPs in one spot, keep certain details private to guests only, and I was easily able to purchase a custom domain name through them.

Our invitations, however, ended up being a last-minute design change once we got our engagement photos back. We both really loved this double exposure photo and thought it would look cool and more personal than the other invitation design which matched our website.

Credit: Sara Rogers Photography

Since we were going to use our own photo, we decided to use Vistaprint instead. Not only is it considerably cheaper than Minted (tip: they have coupon codes all the time; I was able to get 60% off my order by tracking their deals), but we preferred this template for our "movie poster"-style invite. I'm not sharing a picture of the back here but it had some extra photos and details, including a link to our website for people to RSVP.

Vistaprint can be hit-or-miss sometimes but we were very happy with our experience. To avoid disappointment, I would recommend ordering their free wedding sample kit. It takes a while to arrive in the mail but you can see what the different paper stocks actually feel like. We ended up choosing the Linen which was a surprise since I had always thought I'd prefer matte.

The invitations also come with free envelopes but they're plain white and pretty thin. In order to elevate our wedding suite slightly, we opted to spend a little more money (but again, we got that discount!) and got custom envelopes with a grey/white marbled design.

To finish everything off, I ordered a custom address stamp from Etsy (there are tons of designs to choose from) and bought some calligraphy markers from Michael's. I have pretty nice handwriting so I hand-addressed everyone's invitations myself.

One last tip: when you're ordering invites, make sure you count properly! You don't need an invitation for every guest since a lot of people are couples or live in the same household. I ended up slightly over-ordering but I've found uses for the extras... mostly as bookmarks, haha. We also received this Kate Spade New York Take The Cake Double Invitation Frame as a wedding gift which has been a really nice way of displaying our invitation in our home.