‘Tis the season for designing and printing wedding invitations! We have been busy little bees here in the studio, and I thought I’d address some common questions that people have when they are picking up their ‘hot off the press’ invitations and preparing to pop them in the post. Mailing invitations is a whole facet of the invitation process that needs to be thought of beforehand!
“When do I mail out my wedding invitations?”
Traditionally, wedding invitations are mailed out 6-8 weeks before the event. So, if you have a wedding date of June first, you’ll want to be mailing your invitations around the first of April. You could sneak by with mailing them out at the end of March, but not much before. Frankly, it starts to feel a little bit silly to mail your invitations out any more than 3 months before the event… Nobody’s thinking about things that are a solid SEASON away. While I fully understand the need to inform your guests about accommodations and travel arrangements (say, for a destination wedding in particular), that’s what the save the date is for. Remember—once you send the invitation out, there’s nothing coming later to remind guests about it, so if you send your invites out 6 months before the wedding, well… you’ve just given a really, really long gap for people to totally forget about your wedding.
Then when do I send out a save the date?
A save the date can be sent out 6-12 months in advance of your wedding. For destination weddings, it may be wise to do a save the date up to a year out as people will require plenty of time for planning their travel and accommodations. Here’s my word to the wise: There is no need to send out a save the date any later than 4 months before your wedding. If you’re frantically trying to get a save the date in the mail and then you’re going to turn around and mail out an invitation 4 weeks later, it feels a bit like an inundation of your guest’s mailbox. This said, the south has sort of turned me into a little bit of an etiquette nazi on wedding invitations, and I don’t feel like the save the date really has any hard and fast rules in terms of mailing.
How much postage will my invitation take?
I’m going to tell you a true story: Client A asks how much her invitation postage will be. I tell Client A it will probably be between .80-.90 per invitation, but I can’t make any guarantees because the post office is ridiculously inconsistent in their pricing. She takes her invitations in to the post office hub here in Knoxville, and they tell her it will be $1.50 each to mail. She goes back to the same post office two hours later and speaks to a different employee. She’s told it will cost $1.20 each to mail. I then take a sample of her invitation, walk it down to the local downtown post office and promptly mail it for .85. How much postage will your invitation take? You absolutely have to take a finished piece in to have it weighed and measured. And even then , just say a prayer that someone kind is behind the counter. Or, you can just have your stationery handle the entire thing from start to finish. We often purchase the stamps, assemble the invitations, handle the calligraphy, and then mail the invitations. This way, the client doesn’t have to worry about any of that mess.
Where can I find vintage stamps?
Image above from 100 Layer Cake
I love the look of vintage stamps. I always recommended The Paper Nickel Stamp Company online, but their website seems to be defunct, sadly. You can check them out on the Something Turquoise blog here. One of the best resources I’ve found for vintage stamps is off of an old 100 Layer Cake blog entry, which you can check out here. (PS 100 Layer Cake is a fab resource for weddings, just generally speaking). As a general rule, aesthetically I prefer to choose stamps according to a color palette rather than a theme. This said, if vintage stamps are hard to come by or out of your budget, here are some of my favorites from the good ol’ United States Post Office (USPS.com):
I love the colors of the Mark Twain stamp. Plus, who doesn’t love the Americana conjured up from a little Mississippi steamboat action?
The above is one of my favorites because of the neutral color palette and rustic appeal. I use these on reply cards all the time!
Finally, our second favorite American author, O. Henry is also in my personal top running for great looking wedding stamps. Again, the content isn’t super weird (think, bonsai trees or Jazz artists from the 20′s), and the colors are pretty. I go with color almost every time.
Alrighty! I think that covers the basics for you now. Have a super deluxe weekend, folks… and get those invites out soon!!
