Manolo for the Brides

I was all excited about these wedding invitations from Ink Love until I saw that designer Cassie Leedham is located in the UK. While I doubt that she and her staff would have any problems shipping to the US, I do imagine that it might add a bit to the finished prices, which start at £100 for bespoke wedding stationery.

I do wish these quirky and fun invitations had been around (or on my radar) when I was planning my own wedding — not that I’m a pretty-in-pink kind of girl, but the templates are really rocking my world. The invitation on the bottom left is my absolute favorite, and if I received it today, I think I’d save it in my crafting materials box for future use.

(I heartily apologize to those whose comments were erroneously deleted — please feel free to repost!)

All right, I don’t think I have to tell you that it’s a no-no to call up your guests to (ahem) remind them that ties and heels are de rigueur. Nor do I have to remind you that while you can give your FMIL wardrobe suggestions, you cannot choose her wedding day outfit for her. Heck, these days, many brides-to-be are even giving their attendants plenty of leeway when it comes to what to wear!

That said, there’s nothing wrong with obliquely pointing wedding guests in the right direction, especially if many of them have never been to your reception venue and don’t have a contact in the wedding party to press for more info. So what’s the easiest way to tell guests what to wear? Simple — choose telling wedding invitations, like these from Two Paperdolls.

This invitation is a twist on the classic ecru one-sheeter with pearly ink, so I’d choose an updated take on the forever chic little (color) dress. The chosen fonts range from serious to fanciful, which suggests this wedding will be more formal than not. If I was unsure, I’d choose accessories I could shed easily, like kid gloves or a big sparkly necklace.

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Although the length of the average engagement period hovers around 15 months, most couples spend between seven months to a year planning their weddings. That means that there’s a chance that those brides-to-be who are reading Manolo for the Brides are planning autumn weddings. Now I’d never suggest that someone tailor their wedding colors or wedding theme to the season, the notion does appeal to some people. In my next book, for example, my co-author and I describe a harvest-themed wedding that took place in, you guessed it, the fall.

Obviously, you can have a harvest-themed (or harvest colored) wedding without incorporating a lot of dead leaves and pumpkins — the Martha Stewart tablescape on the bottom left includes neither — but those are both viable options. I love the slightly quirky leaf and crystal bouquet from Creations, and it would make an easy DIY project if you locale supports deciduous trees.

Other ideas: Incorporate Autumn Splendor accessories into your wedding day look, string red and green apples into natural garlands, serve spice cake and apple cider in place of wedding cake and champagne, wear a gold wedding gown instead of the usual white dress, clothe your bridesmaids in a deep chocolate brown, give guests miniature caramel apples in lieu of more traditional favors, or carry a bouquet of flowers traditionally associated with autumn, like mums and helianthus.

If that sounds way too theme-y for you but you wouldn’t mind adding just a touch of fall flair to your wedding decor, pick one idea and treat it like a centerpiece, designing your color scheme around it.

When it comes to unusual invitations, these have to be the most unconventional — and the coolest — I’ve seen yet. Designer Matt Terich and his wife Tere Mendez create decidedly untraditional wedding stationery that looks like sweet rock concert posters. They do a smashing job at it, too, which is not particularly surprising considering that Terich makes at least part of his living doing poster work for bands.

Each invitation created by the duo behind Poster Bride is 100% original — sketched by hand, rendered onto film, transferred to a silk screen, and printed in house. The process is simple. You and your intended chat with Terich and Mendez so they can get a feel for your relationship and your tastes, then they send you a few prototype posters for you to choose from. Of course, if rock posters aren’t your thing, they also make beautiful custom letterpress invitations.

Two more things:

• Some legit comments were accidentally deleted today during the early morning spam deletion fest, and if yours were among them, I’d ask you to repost so we can see what you were thinking.
• Tomorrow evening, I’ll be pimping iDo at the Meadow Club’s Fall Bridal Showcase in Port Jefferson, NY from 7 to 10 p.m. If that’s your locale and you’re coming to the show, be sure to stop by my table and say hi!

Long story short: A new comment on a post I wrote over a year ago inspired me to revisit polka dots. As far as themes and schemes go, polka dots are fairly mellow when you consider that there sci-fi weddings and sports-inspired weddings.

If you want to go above and beyond color without entering the megatheme zone, polka dots may just be your salvation. Big or small, colored or not, polka dots speak volumes about the brides who choose them. Far from dotty, these fun chicks take whimsy just far enough.

The deets: Favor boxes by Favor Ideas, dress by DollyDagger, cake by Baskin Robbins, invitations by Melissa Kelsey, tags by maythird, and travel cases by Beauty and the Beads.

Before it slips my mind completely, pop over to Manolo for the Big Girl to read all about a bridesmaid who was the victim of a size-related bait-and-switch. Ick.

It appears that the polar opposite of the cameo-and-ribbon-wearing invitation is gaining ground with modern maids and men looking to save both trees and money spent on stamps. Don’t be surprised if sometime in the future you receive an invitation in the form of an e-mail, PDF, Facebook or Myspace message, URL, PowerPoint presentation, text message(!), or DVD.

Huh. Don’t get me wrong — online invites are great for barbecues and birthday parties, but as realistic as I am about where those paper wedding invitations will eventually end up, it’s still nice to ooh and ahh over them when they arrive via post in their thick ecru envelopes. After scouring the web to find out what the average Joe and Jane think about e-invites, this remains my favorite response:

If I received an e-mailed invitation, I’d reply with an e-mail attachment of a picture of a gift.

Text messages asking “wll u com 2 my wddng?” will likely always be tacky — we can hope — but I kind of like the DVD idea if it’s done right.

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Once upon a time, I was delighted to receive wedding invitations festooned with stuff. I’d save the ribbons — the cats like them and they came in handy when Christmas rolled around — and clip off and save things like tiny wooden rings, carved plastic medallions, and mini broochy sorts of things I could hot glue onto photo albums in need of a touch of sparkle.

Nowadays I tend to admire these marvels of invitational engineering before clipping off whatever embellishments are recyclable and tossing whatever isn’t. I don’t know exactly when my tolerance for do-dads, thingies, ribbons, and bling went down, but it might have had something to do with all the nuptial chachkas I’d accrued over time.

I’m still of two minds on the subject. Yes, an invitation wearing a cameo choker, gilded frame, or enamel brooch is fun and visually interesting. On the other hand, if your invitation won’t close without a velvet and rhinestone belt, that’s a tad strange. My own wedding stationery was comprised of rather plain gold seal-n-send invitations, but we chose those because the price was right and neither The Beard nor I wanted to spend ages assembling multi-part packets.

I do think the Carciofi Design stationery above is very pretty, though according to the web site it’s also pretty pricey.

For 100 custom wedding invitation sets with printed outer envelopes, reply cards, printed reply envelopes and enclosure cards the price ranges from $1200-$4000. Letterpress, engraving, or thermography are available upon request (special pricing applies). Quotes do not include shipping and handling.

Right now, the invitation I’d most like to receive would be one of those traditionalesque one-sided ecru numbers with only a hint of embellishment. If I was getting married all over again, that’s probably the sort I’d send out. I am curious to know whether or not I’m in the minority here, so I simply have to ask: Do you get a kick out of invitations with all the trimmings or would you (like me) prefer to receive something simpler?

I’ve always said there’s one thing weddings and funerals have in common: both are usually being planned by someone who has no experience in doing so at a time when it’s easy to be emotionally manipulated. That means it’s easy for vendors to sell you things you don’t need, don’t want, and can’t reasonably fit into your budget. It’s easy for the unscrupulous to convince you that an etiquette violation is precisely what etiquette requires. It’s easy to make decisions that later make you ask yourself what precisely was in your morning coffee on the day you chose to blow half your budget on pyrotechnics when you don’t really care about fireworks.

Well, you’re in luck. You have me to cut through the sales talk and sentimentality and give you the skinny on what is actually needed, what’s a fun optional extra you might want to consider, and what’s outright wrong on toast with a cherry on top.

So let’s talk stationery.

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Monograms are easy to come by — you can get your and your honey’s initials plastered on everything from napkins to invitations to favor bags. At its core, however, a monogram is just a set of letters written in fancy script…and put that way, monograms start to sound rather unexciting.

How do you spice up a set of initials? If you’re one of the many people designing custom wedding monograms for brides- and grooms-to-be, you capitalize on the fact that branding is hot right now and call it a logo. Why does semantics work in this particular instance? My guess is that the same people who think monograms are classy (albeit boring) also want to make their wedding accouterments as individualized as possible.

I googled ‘wedding logo’ and found Love Letters logos, Marry Monograms, and Love Logos, among others. The prices are, respectively, $75, $49.95, and $35, which buys you a logo such as this one from Love Logos:

But if you’re at all artistically inclined or have a friend who was born with the design gene, do you really need to shell out thirty-five smackers to brand your nuptials?

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