My new favorite source for custom wedding stationery? This Paper Ship of Greensboro, North Carolina, where Joel and Ashley Selby design and print totally sweet custom wedding invitations, custom wedding maps, and things like RSVP cards and save-the-dates. Er, they also do all kinds of other stuff like cute cut-outs of people’s cats and fliers for businesses and even custom headers for blogs, but I’m mainly interested in the wedding stuff, duh.

Wood you marry me, heh. I love the envelope color they chose to go with it, too.

The pattern on these invitations (or was it RSVP cards or save-the-dates?) was repeated in other areas of the stationery suite as a monogram.

Did I mention they hand draw their maps? Because they do.

Of course, if you’d rather, they’d be happy to design your wedding stationery using photographs of you and your intended as the starting point.

This Paper Ship will be set up to sell packages through their web site soon, but for now they’re pushing their weddings invitations, etc., in an Etsy shop. You can also find them on Facebook, where they frequently post those cute custom cat cut-outs I mentioned earlier.

The lovely Rebekah wrote to ask this somewhat complicated question about wedding stationery:

My fiancé and I are eloping later this month. He wanted to get married sooner rather than later, but we’d still like to have a big wedding sometime next year. (Have your cake and eat it too, anyone?) I was thinking that perhaps we could send out wedding announcements combined with a “save-the-date” announcement for a vow renewal and reception. So, how would one word a “We got married and you weren’t there, but you can be at the next one” card without sounding tacky?

First, I’ll tell you what not to do, which is go with the flippant phrasing you used in your question. Not that I think you would, mind, but there are people reading who might just think it’s a good idea because it sounds just a little cheeky. Usually, engagement announcements and save-the-date cards are the place to get a little silly or sarcastic, and wedding invitations are the place to convey the main deets in an elegant and dignified way. Usually.

But your stationery will probably be a little different. First, it won’t exactly be a marriage announcement (since it’s also a save-the-date for your reception) or a wedding save-the-date (since you already said your vows). Second, while you want to convey the information in most save-the-date cards, you may want to make it more solemn or serious than not since elopements can cause hurt feelings among those people who reeeaaallly wanted you to have a “proper” wedding. And third, there’s the vow renewal complicating matters. Some couples will have a reception to celebrate an earlier wedding ceremony, but you’ll be throwing a second ceremony in there, too. (As an aside, this stymied The Beard, who wondered why you wouldn’t either keep the elopement a secret and just get married or just have the reception without the vow renewal.)

So to recap, you need wording for a marriage announcement combined with a not-quite save-the-date for a vow renewal with a reception to follow. For those who don’t know, a marriage announcement or wedding announcement announces that a couple is now married and includes details like the bride and groom’s names and the date of the marriage. Maybe a photo of the wedding, too. They are most often sent out when a couple has had a very small wedding or eloped, but they’re typically not serving as save-the-dates.

My advice is to make sure that word gets around that you’re married and that you eloped so you’re not fielding confused phone calls from relatives asking why they weren’t invited to your wedding or “What do you mean, vow renewal?” or “You did what?!” It seems to me just a tad iffy to spring your being married already on people on your save-the-dates. Better that as many people as possible already know if you’re truly sold on the idea of combining marriage announcements with save-the-dates. Once the grapevine has been primed, go with simple, straightforward wording on whatever cardstock floats your boat. Something like:

This is where I’ll freely admit I had trouble coming up with wording that wouldn’t lead to shocked phone calls or hurt feelings or clucking tongues, but frankly you run the risk of fielding all those things (and more) when you plan a plain old regular wedding. If you want to elope first, do it. The Beard and I contemplated doing the very same thing, so I don’t know where his objections are coming from. Now I’ll open the floor — since this is a toughie, I welcome our awesome readers to give their word suggestions. Let’s help a sister out!

Photographer Corinna J. Hoffman took this beautiful picture of one of the more unusual and interesting save-the-date announcements I’ve seen.

One of the brides-to-be whose wedding Ms. Hoffman will be photographing loved the handkerchiefs Lucky Luxe created for her so much that she had them sent to Ms. Hoffman first so she could photograph them before they were sent off to the wedding guests.

I’ll come right out and say that I LOVE the idea. While save-the-dates are not at all a necessary piece of wedding stationery in most cases, they have become a commonplace part of the wedding stationery package. I like the idea of a save-the-date announcement that is also a keepsake that goes above and beyond the usual postcard or magnet. Plus, a save-the-date handkerchief can be used at the wedding itself by those guests who know that their eyes are going to spring a little leak during the vows.

What say you? Awesome or a little too frou-frou?

Cleverly named wedding stationery OutVite (who happened to send me an e-mail a while back) sells custom printed invitations and other paper products designed for the LGBT community. As much as I want to cheer them on, I’m just not sure they are truly marketing to a niche market that has been ignored until now. Before I explain why, let me say that I am all for wedding stationery created for people who weren’t cut from the quasi-traditional Caucasian-bride-and-groom-in-their-early-20s mold. After all, my mother is engaged to be married to another woman, and I’m glad to see that she could get a wedding invitation with two brides on it if she in fact wanted one.

While a goodly number of OutVite’s designs feature two men, two women, two wedding dresses, two pairs of boxer shorts, and other graphics indicating that the participants in the wedding will be people who also happen to be homosexual, most of the invitation and wedding shower invite designs could be used by homosexual and heterosexual couples alike… just like most wedding stationery everywhere. Sure, some wedding stationery features a bride and groom motif, but lots more is embellished with simple bands of color, ribbons, logos, hearts and what-have-you, or other images, themes, and/or doo-dads.

Like I said, I’m definitely glad to see multi-bride or multi-groom or multi-whatever wedding invitations, shower invitations, response cards, and all that jazz. In fact, I’d like to see more of it! It’s not hard to find gorgeous wedding stationery, but it can be hard to find, say, gorgeous wedding stationery in different colors and designs that features the silhouettes of two women or two men. I guess that’s why I was a little disappointed in OutVite. I scrolled through seven pages of invitations, and only a handful were specifically geared toward homosexual couples. The rest were lovely, but not what I’d call “Gay and Lesbian Stationery.”

Unless it’s the stationery itself that’s homosexual, heh.

Longinvitation is long:

Omg, LOVE.

What say you?

In the past year, various online enterprises have spent at least some of their PR dollars trying to convince me that online invitations and email invitations are just what brides- and grooms-to-be have been searching for. They’re the green option for today’s conscious couples! They cost less than letterpress! Everyone will flip over your choice of one of 10 cool designs! And so on, and so forth. I thought that, after offering up my own opinion, I’d leave it up to you to decide whether I’ve been somehow remiss in ignoring those press releases.

Um, HATE. As much potential as online wedding invitations from companies like Pingg should have, being that they’re kind of environmentally friendly and easy and cheap to send out, the fact is that it’s still nice to get a good heavy piece of printed cardstock in the mail when it’s nuptials we’re talking about. Perhaps the only time one should receive a virtual wedding invitation is if one is invited to a virtual wedding… at which time (as some anonymous so-and-so once said) I suppose it would be wholly appropriate to send a virtual gift.

What say you?

Wedding stationery experts Hello! Lucky just added a new option to their list of pretty stationery options. Up until now, they specialized in lovely letterpress printing, which I cannot deny absolutely rocks my socks. I love letterpress wedding stationery and am glad that it made a big comeback a few years ago. That said, not everyone can afford it. Heck, not everyone likes it!

And there are so many other printing options out there, from engraving (which uses a copper plate negative to create raised inked impressions in paper) to thermography (which mimics engraving using heat-treated colored resins to create raised lettering) to foil stamping (which also uses a copper plate negative except with foils instead of inks) to offset lithography (which uses a rubber cylinder or plate to transfer ink to paper).

So what is Hello! Lucky’s new option? Surprisingly, it’s digital printing, which is cheaper even than lithography because it utilizes high resolution digital printers to produce wedding invitations and thank you cards instead of more expensive printing equipment. All of the shop’s digital designs are printed on high-end museum quality cotton paper so your wedding invitations are going to look good, if not quite as good as letterpress invitations.

When it came to my own wedding invitations, I went with thermography, but that was because it was the only option offered with the paper I liked. Were I to go back and do it all again, I’d probably do DIY wedding invitations and print them myself. I’m curious to know what you chose or are thinking of choosing so I put together a little poll.

After you choose your answer, let us know why you chose (or are choosing) the wedding stationery you did (or will) in the comments.