A Royal Wedding Invitation
Prince William and Catherine Middleton have had Buckingham Palace send out the invitations for the Royal Wedding this week. I think we all forgot how lucky they are to have a staff to do these tasks for them, although there is far more to planning a Royal Wedding than an average wedding. I almost expected to see Kate & William stuffing envelopes with the staff, but I guess not.
I remember staying up until 1AM trying to figure out how my husband’s color laser printer was going to feed all these envelopes to print on, and we had to stuff them ourselves too.
All the stationery we had for our wedding, from the save the date cards to the invitations, place-cards, menus and programs were challenging. We had some printed for us (The save the date & invitations were from Wedding Paper Divas / TinyPrints) and the rest we had to do ourselves. Finding stock images that could work in the design was a challenge. Getting things printed, cut, packaged and ready was another story. 
It is a lot of work. Some people print the whole invitation and all the inserts with response info themselves, I can’t imagine how much time that would take!
Even making the choice about your wedding invitations can be challenging. There are no less than 1 million designs out there for wedding invitations. Looking online seemed simpler than looking through huge books at stationery stores. The designs online were more modern also.
William & Catherine’s wedding invitation is much simpler than I thought it would be. I am sure it is engraved and all, but there isn’t any design personality there and it almost doesn’t even seem Royal. I suppose this could be in response to the recession and keeping it simple. I expected more flourishes, more script and more color.
The good thing is that you can do anything you want with designing your wedding invitations as long as it has the right information on it. Some people think that wedding invitations are really a waste of money because they get tossed in the recycle bin by most people right after the wedding. I don’t think everyone tosses them in the bin, I think friends and family do save them, and for the family archive you should think of having something that you would be proud to show your kids someday. The demo version of mine is at left below Kate & William’s, but there are even more beautiful invitations available now than there were in 2009.
Whatever you decide with your wedding invitations, make sure you love them. They cost a lot of money and can’t be returned. Try and ignore the advice from everyone else, it is your wedding and your decision.