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Personalize Your Wedding Invitations

© Amy Cunningham, Editor

Your wedding invitation is the first glimpse of your upcoming nupitals that your guests will see. It sets the tone for your wedding and should reflect you as a couple and the style of wedding you are having. Pay attention to the details as the little things are what make your wedding invitations special, romantic, and unique.

Selecting Your Personalized Wedding Invitations
The first step in personalizing your wedding invitations is to select the invitation itself.

Pick a theme.
One of the easiest ways to personalize your invitations is to tailor them to your theme. If you've chosen a theme for your wedding, such as roses, western, beach, fall leaves, holidays, etc, then select an invitation that coordinates with that theme. Generally your wedding theme is a piece of the two of you and your invitations should refelct that.

Choose Your Invitations.
So what about stationery? Or printing? Or wording?

The first thing to remember is to let your wedding guide you. Are you having a formal wedding or mid-afternoon casual?

When starting the wedding invitation search, it's a good idea to keep your wedding time & formality in the back of your mind. If you're having a formal wedding, you'll likely want a thicker, more luxorious stationery. If you're having a mid-afternoon wedding, you may want something lighter. If you're wedding is outdoors, you may want something that's a little flimsy, similating the breezy wind. When choosing your stationery, choose one that reflects the overall tone of your wedding.

The next thing you'll need to decide is if you want printing or engraving. Engraving is the process of pressing the design into the paper so that it is visible on both sides of the sheet. Engraving gives your invitation a more luxiours look and feel. If you're having a more formal wedding, you'll likely want to go with engraving. Otherwise, you have the invitations printed, which gives a similar effect, but at a lower cost.

The last, but most imporant step in personalizing your wedding inviations is to select your wording.

The wording of your invitation is the one part that will stand out the most. It is also the most important thing to think about when personalizing your wedding invitations. There are several traditional wedding invitation wordings, but if you really want to personalize your invitations, look for something that fits you and your fiance's personalities. You may want to look through poems, quotes, song lyrics, and other written works for inspiration.

Personalizing Your Envelopes.
Now that you have a personalized wedding invitation, it's time to add that personal touch to your invitation envelopes.

Addressing Your Envelopes.
Addressing your envelope is just as important as your invitations and is wrought with its own set of etiquette. The easiest actually the 'proper' way to address your envelopes is to write them out in your own handwriting. What's more personal than your own handwriting? If you really don't want to address all of those evenlopes, you could have a font created based on your handwriting. This will give the impression that you've handwritten the envelopes, even if you didn't have the time to do so.

If you want to give them a more elegant feel, learn calligraphy. Calligraphy is an elegant and popular way of addressing wedding invitations, but if you want to keep them personal, do it yourself!

Sealing Your Envelopes.
Once the invitations are selcted and addressed, you may not think that you can personalize them more, but you can!

Stamping Your Invitations.
One of the most unique things we've come across are the new photo stamps. Previously, most wedding invitations went out with the 'Love' stamps from the post office. Now you can create your own personalized stamps. You could create a stamp with your engagement photo on it or come up with a romantic graphic that would match your theme.

Mailing Them Off.
Now that your invitations are addressed and stamped, it's time to send them off! You've personalized every detail of your wedding invitations down to the stamps. One last thing you may want to consider to make sure that you're personalized wedding inviations stay nice and personalized is to hand-stamp them at the post office. Not all postmasters will allow this, but many brides have hand-stamped their envelopes so that everything is personalized and elegant down to the postage marks on the envelopes.