A Guide to Choosing Your Wedding Stationery

If you're reading this then our guess is you're getting married some time in the not-too-distant future. Congratulations! If that is the case, then we're also guessing you’re pretty excited about your big day and can't wait to tell all your friends and family about your forthcoming wedding.

Choosing your wedding stationery is just one small part of the wedding planning process but it is an important one, as the invitations you send out will really set the scene for your big day. And if you are anything like us, you will want everything about your day – including the build-up to it – to be just perfect.

So to help you along the path to a perfect wedding, we – as specialist handmade wedding and civil partnership stationers – have put together a wedding stationery guide for you, which we hope you will find useful. So grab yourself a glass of bubbly (after all, it’s not every day you get married!) and take some time out to read our guide…

What is a hotspot not?

Fear not! Our wedding stationery guide is not just a mechanism for us to tell you how great our stationery is and that your wedding won't be the same without it (although we hope you agree that we do have some rather scrumptious designs!), but rather is a source of information on the different things you need to be thinking about and the decisions you need to make when it comes to your wedding stationery.

Your own sense of style and taste will guide your decision on the type of wedding stationery you opt for, but we hope our expertise in the design and production of wedding and civil partnership stationery will help make this part of your wedding planning just that little bit easier.

Save the what?

Save the Whale? Well yes, if you're that way inclined go right ahead. But to bring you back to your wedding plans, we're talking 'save the date'. Save the date cards are, shall we say, the 'holding statement' of the wedding stationery world.

A lot of wedding couples settle on a date for their big day before they finalise a venue for the actually ceremony or subsequent celebrations. Sending save the date cards gives your guests plenty of advance warning to plan their diaries and you the time you need to make that all-important decision about where your wedding celebrations will take place.

Save the date cards are not for everyone; they can add to your overall wedding stationery costs and are not always necessary, so don't be fooled into thinking the save the date card is 'this year's black'. They do, however, come into their own when your chosen wedding date clashes with a popular event (such as the cup final or Wimbledon, if your friends and family are ball sport fans) or is during the holiday season.

Oh Suzie, what shall I wear?

Hat or no hat? A pressing question for your female guests, maybe, but we're guessing it's not high on your list of priorities right now. Your thoughts are probably more focused on who to invite to your wedding and when to invite them. Although we'd love to sprinkle (serendipity) star dust on your wedding budget to give it endless capacity, we're afraid that no amount of jiggery pokery on our part will make that happen, so the task of drawing up your guest list is yours alone.

Once you have drawn up your list, you will be able to work out the number of invitations you need. You should allow one invitation per individual, couple or family. So, if you are inviting Mr and Mrs Miggins and their fleet of small children, it is perfectly acceptable to send one invitation for the entire family.

Even if you know in advance that some of the guests on your list can't make your wedding, you might like to send them an invitation anyway, as the gesture may leave them feeling all warm and squishy inside – just like a freshly toasted marshmallow.

We would also recommend you order a few extra of each of your wedding stationery items to allow for those inevitable bloopers where a momentary lapse in concentration (or Freudian slip!) results in the invitation to your Auntie Aggy being addressed to your Auntie Angry. Not good for family relations!

You should aim to send your invitations out two to three months before your wedding. When planning the timings for your wedding stationery, you also need to factor in the time it will take to write and address your invitations and the lead times involved in ordering your stationery (which will vary depending on the style of invitations you choose).

If you have your heart set on handmade or bespoke stationery but need your invitations in a hurry, don’t be afraid to ask your favourite designer if they can accommodate your needs. Some may break out into a cold sweat or pass out at the very suggestion of your short lead times, but other stationers may be able to juggle their diaries to fit you in, so it’s always worth enquiring (you may just need to be ready with the smelling salts).

Always, always, always ask your wedding stationer for a proof of your stationery (such as wedding invitation inserts, order of service, menus) before they go to print, otherwise you could end up with a tissue mountain the size of a small African country – something we wouldn't wish on any bride-and-groom-to-be.

Chase me, chase me!

You have enough to worry about with planning and organising your wedding, so the last thing you want to be doing is running round in circles chasing responses to your invitations. Not only will this make you dizzy but it will take your attention away from other parts of your wedding planning. So make sure that your invitations include an RSVP date and address and if you're feeling super extravagant, include an appropriately addressed reply card with your invitations. Many wedding stationers offer RSVP cards to match your invitations.

By our reckoning, you should now have reached the bottom of – or be very close to draining – your champagne flute. So while you nip back to the ice bucket for a refill, we'll retreat back to our design studio. If you have any more questions, please feel free to give us a tinkle – we like it when the phone rings (we have a silly ring tone that we get up and dance to). Alternatively, you can drop us an email with your questions and we'll get back to you as soon as we've washed our hands of the glitter that they're bound to be covered in, as it makes a terrible mess of the keyboard.