All Things Wedding Stationery!

I realize I've hardly commented at all, save for a brief mention here and there, about my wedding. While a lot of the details I prefer keeping private, I do want to share the wonderful experience with various paperies I've used for my wedding stationery.

Save The Dates
The Save The Dates (usually abbreviated as STDs, but I can't bring myself to use that) are a really fun addition to wedding stationery. They are especially appropriate if you have guests coming from out of town/state, or if you are doing a destination wedding, so that your guests can prepare appropriately. The selection is virtually endless, as far as design, customization and size goes. I've had girlfriends who've done magnets (SO cute, but a little pricey) and those who've stuck with traditional paper. My fiance and I used Minted, a popular online paper company that offers everything from wedding invitations to customized everyday stationery. We went with the following design and customized it to fit our needs:

(Photo credit: http://www.minted.com/ - obviously this isn't ours, this is the sample featured on the site)

My experience with Minted was nothing short of perfect. They are efficient, quick, and high quality. They also offer a choice of 100% recycled paper, which was important to us, since my fiance is quite the environmentalist. Some other great sites for ordering Save The Dates online are:

• Wedding Paper Divas - link, here (my bridal shower invitations are from this site, though since they haven't been sent out yet I decided not to share them)
• Zazzle - link, here (more exciting stuff about Zazzle in a sec!)

Wedding Invitations

I loved picking out invitations, and my mom and I took our sweet time doing so. In fact, they are in the final processes of getting finalized and printed as we speak. We really wanted a thick, weighty paper with gorgeous type, a direction card, of course the RSVP card, and a beautiful French envelope/sleeve to put the invitation in prior to the actual outer envelope. We found all of this and more with Smock Paper. Smock offers letterpress invitations and stationery (letterpress being one of the more expensive, but chicer, methods of printing) that are completely customizable and very modern. The following examples are not what we went with, but are some of the choices that Smock offers on their website:

(Photo Credit: http://www.smockpaper.com/)

We loved the range of choices, the beautifully thick bamboo paper (again, a huge plus to my fiance and I) and my favorite part -- custom postage stamps! Smock designed a PDF format of the stamp that would match our invites and be personal to us, and we used Zazzle to order the stamp itself. It's little personal touches like that which I think really make the invitation special!

Smock Paper wasn't cheap - luckily, my parents are traditional and are funding the whole thing (thanks, guys!!!), but it was important to us to not scrimp on such a big day. There are plenty of options out there that are just as nice for much less -- you just have to decide what is important to you, the bride, and what's not so important.

Questions or comments? Leave 'em below!