Alternative invitations
By Never teh Bride
Last week I received a postcard in the mail from my friends Will and Leah. It was a save-the-date card announcing the details of their upcoming nuptials. While it is not unusual to receive such a card, it was slightly less than usual in this case because:
1. The postcard (which featured a lovely picture of the couple) was not a follow up to a traditional paper invitation but in lieu of one, and
2. The postcard served as a mechanism to point its recipients (The Beard and I) toward Will and Leah’s wedding web site.
Now I imagine that Will and Leah did send traditional invitations to their families and less tech-savvy friends. But for a soon-to-be wed couple that has a lot of friends scattered about the country and wants to give their prospective guests as much information as possible, attractive postcards that point to a web site can be a fabulous and fiscally sensible idea.
I like a good web site (especially when it’s about weddings) and Will and Leah’s site has a nice layout and is rich in detail. Of course, it helps that Leah is no stranger to creating web sites. If, however, you are like me and most comfortable typing into prefabricated textboxes, there are a number of services (both free and not so free) that will aid you in the creation of a wedding web site.
Wed Quarters: This service offers a variety of colorful templates and costs $25 for a year of hosting. Users can craft an unlimited number of custom pages but I’m not sure how much space they provide for images.
My Event: Users pay roughly $10 per month for a web site with images, music, video, and flash. Visitors can RSVP for the wedding right on the site.
The Knot: The Knot has 40 very simple templates, and allows users to send electronic save-the-date cards and guest updates. It is free for site members.
Wedding Window: This service is $79 for 12 months and seems to provide elegant results. See Star Jones’ wedding site.
Brides and grooms that are less interested in using their site as a vehicle for information and simply want to document the process can always use a free blogging service like Blogger to satisfy their craving for high-tech hitchin’.
The computer cake topper above is by Joshua’s Clay Creations.
April 3rd, 2006 at 3:33 pm
also, TypePad has a wedding template, so you could blog your wedding if you wanted, or just set up a wedding sit eby category: you know, directions, hotel info, photos, etc.
I already took bridezilla.typepad.com for my own wedding. what?
April 3rd, 2006 at 4:03 pm
Ahahaha, awesome, ginevra! Thanks for the tip!
April 3rd, 2006 at 5:38 pm
For a brief while I was associated with planning large scientific meetings and online registration of attendees was the best. How about online RSVPs that can get fed directly into spreadsheets?
April 4th, 2006 at 1:25 am
At this point whenever we receive a paper invitiation, my husband enters the info into his computer—and then promptly throws it away, no matter how tasteful or beautiful or expensive it might have been. I always cringe (and often try to rescue said invite); but in his book any more paper is just that…more paper. And do any of us really need more paper? I hate to admit it, but in many ways he’s practically, brutally, unsentimentally right…
April 4th, 2006 at 10:59 am
We had magnets that had our names, the date & an email address to rsvp to. Worked quite well. Website would have been VERY groovy…
Another question, N-t-B, dahlink,… so, the wedding is done, I’ve experienced the post-wedding blues, I’m working on the thank-you cards… but what is proper for storing the dress? Where can I find a box, or a garment bag, or acid free tissue, or something to keep ANYTHING from eating or fading my fantastic red silk dress? It’s currently sprawled with abandon across my spare room bed, but sooner or later, I’ll have houseguests, & I NEVER want to do as one cousin of mine did, & leave it hanging in the basmenet to be wrecked by a flood.
It really was a great dress. (And a fantasticly fun wedding!) Check out the photographers website to see:
http://www.rosannaparry.com/darkroom/wedding_kourtney_pat.htm
(& here’s a recomendation: Rosanna Parry kicked butt – she was fantastic to work with, and she posts photos on her website afterwards. Yes, free advertising for her, but so easy for my techie friends to get copies of the pics! Brilliant!!)
April 4th, 2006 at 11:08 am
jenny: I hate to admit that I’m rather like that. I used to have a collection of the cards and invitations I’d received over the years. Then it began to get out of hand, growing beyond the boxes I’d alotted! So to the recycling center they went…yet I still find myself surrounded by paper!
Kourtney: Great topic – look for it later in the week
April 4th, 2006 at 11:13 am
Oh, and what a gorgeous dress, Kourtney!!! Love it!
GK: I do believe Wedding Window allows you to export your RSVPs into other programs, but does not do it automatically.
April 4th, 2006 at 11:40 am
So I’m reading this and I’m thinking….”Oh! What a coincidence.” Then I click the link and realize it’s MY Willeah you’re talking about.
Damn!
April 4th, 2006 at 12:56 pm
Hey, cool! Maybe I’ll see you at their wedding. And, of course, congratulations on your own upcoming nuptials!
April 5th, 2006 at 1:31 am
Gorgeous dress, Kourtney! Beautiful color, and so flattering!
April 5th, 2006 at 11:44 am
Hola to the Kourtney! What a wonderful dress! And to preserve it properly, I direct you to http://www.si.edu/SCMRE/takingcare/acidfree.htm, which not only chats a bit about the correct storage of textiles, but lists numerous suppliers of acid-free tissue, including by the roll (instead of those tiny little comic-book sized sheets) and acid-free boxes. My own suggestion would be storing it flat, in an acid-free box, with plenty of acid-free tissues stuffed under, around, between and above. This way it can be tucked under a bed (less prone to flooding!) and safely out of the way, and you can take it out once a year, shake it, and re-fold it so that the creases are in a different spot, reducing the tendency of silk to crack along the folds. Make sure you have plenty of lavender to help ward off Mothra. I would recommend against hanging storage; most people cheat and don’t use cloth garment bags. Plastic is bad, bad, bad for storing clothes; inert gases build up, discolouring fabric, among other horrors. The dress also has much more strain placed on specific areas, when it’s hanging up instead of lying flat. Remember to label the box on all four sides and on the top! You may recognize the box instantly, but not everyone will. This way no one will put it under a pile of boxes in the future.
*Always remember to store silk by itself; when silk is stored touching another fabric, it causes silk to deteriorate much more quickly than when it touches silk only.
**Yes, I know this is a quandry when you have silk combined in a garment with another fabric.
***No, I don’t have a solution for that.