Choosing wedding stationery has to be up there with choosing a colour scheme – it’s difficult! Where do you start? What kind do you need? Do you need a theme? What is a bellyband? Argh!
Well, fear not. We have Bunny Delicious to explain and take you through the types and styles that suit your personalities.
So to round up, here are the top 5 stationery items that you should consider for your big day…
Save the date
From the moment that beautiful sparkly ring is on your finger, you want to tell everyone – your friends, your family, the postman, even the checkout man in Tesco. It’s like you’re walking around with a permanent glowing aura of happiness. Engagement has its ebbs and flows. Once the initial excitement tails off, the one way to keep wedding momentum is to send out save the date cards. This little act of announcing your wedding date works in three ways:
- It makes it feel real, you’ve committed to a date, plus you get to live in a limelight for a little bit longer
- Your intended guest list can indeed save the date by circling the date on their calendars
- You will have plenty of time to choose the correct wedding stationery and style for your day
Plus when are you ever going to be this excited about stationery ever again in your life?
Invitations
Etiquette has changed somewhat over the last few years. Invitations once came from the bride’s family announcing the marriage of their daughter to another family’s son. With the modern age, and everything associated with modern living, the order of engagement, marriage and children has widely changed.
But you still need, and the world still needs, pretty paper invitations. They evoke a happy emotion that a two-line text message ever can. The styles, designs, and themes that you can get, can be overwhelming, and sometimes it best to look at wide range and discount what you don’t love, in order to narrow it down to what you do love.
Follow blogs, flick through magazines, scour Pinterest – your perfect style is out there, waiting for you to discover it. A wedding invitation is a powerful piece of stationery. It says more about your wedding than you will ever give it credit for.
Aside from the obvious, where, when and what time, an invitation sets a tone for the day, whether it is a relaxed afternoon tea style in a marquee, a formal black tie soiree in a heritage house in the middle of nowhere.
A beautiful design will get your guests excited for the day, which don’t forget is also a wonderful day out for them, and you want to keep that excitement high for your big day.
Table plan
A wedding without a table plan is pandemonium, so let’s not even go there. If you are having more than 10 guests, and you are having a formal sit down meal, you need a table plan.
From basic print styles to handmade works of creativity, there are a multitude of styles available, but thankfully way less than wedding stationery styles, so hopefully an easier decision to make. Why not have it framed after your wedding day, it makes for a glorious piece of your history.
Guest book
Guest books sometimes get a bad rep because they are often left places and no-one signs them. It’s kind of on par with buying a new pair of trainers to go running, never taking them out of the box and then complaining that you’ve not got any fitter.
The simple trick with the guest book is to task someone in your bridal party to walk it around the tables during dinner, and rather like a Mexican wave, it will pick up momentum and will travel by itself. The comments you get will be so worth it though – the viewpoint of your wedding from your guests!
Little details that you deemed irrelevant will be someone else’s star point of the day and trust me, they will write that in your book and you will read it and probably cry. But if you never had a guest book, you will miss out hugely on this very simple reminder of your day. If you really want to maximise the book’s potential, why not ask for marriage tips for the bride and groom – the comments will have you laughing and it’s a great icebreaker around the table.
Thank you cards
Even if your wedding goes against every tradition and trend in the book, gratitude is one thing you must adhere to. Aside from the fantastic wedding presents and vouchers you will receive, there will have been an entire unseen army behind the scenes; family, friends and co-workers that have listened to your excited witterings, your hopes, your fears and even your manic meltdowns at 2am via text message.
Thank you cards are often overlooked once the wedding is over, sending them a year after the wedding because you’ve been ‘very busy’ is a no no. Set a timeframe for after the wedding or honeymoon and aim to write a few a day, but DO send them, as a closing nod to your wedding day.
For more gorgeous stationery from Bunny Delicious, head to their website. And brides-to-be, a word of warning – don’t make any of these mistakes with your save-the-dates!