Weddingbee

We are doing single plain envelopes with no special lining. We are printing out both address info and return address info using our good old desktop printer. I honestly think this is one of the biggest wastes of money on something that only people planning weddings would notice. I’ve been to a fair share of weddings in the past, and seeing as how I have a single invitation saved and no envelopes, I have a hard time believing my friends will notice or appreciate the “extra” when they throw both the envelope and invitation in the trash when they get back from the reception. (It’s also the reason we are printing the DIY invites that come 50 to a package from Michael’s.)

Twelvetigers - I guess the point of my post was that even if you don’t WANT to worry yourself with the details, these ARE still decisions you have to make. You made the decision to let your stationer pick the envelope (as long as you didn’t object), but then you still had to decide how to write the names on it, and what stamps to use, and how to address them…whether you spent weeks stressfully contemplating these options (which I’m guessing the vast majority of brides don’t) or not, you can’t address envelopes until you know what they’re going to say, you can’t get return addresses on there until you decide if you’re going to tell the stationer to print them or you’ll do it yourself, etc. So if you look at the poll answers, in fact the majority of people are using white or offwhite envelopes in a standard rectangular shape with no lining or inner envelope (like you presumably), and if you read my earlier post you’d see that for several of these questions when the thought passed my head I said “eh, I can do without that.” So I guess what I’m trying to get at is if you don’t want to answer the poll questions, you certainly don’t have to (haha now I’m wondering if you CAN make them mandatory!), but these are still decisions you made, no matter how much or little time you put into thinking about it. I even tried to put poll answers specifically on there for people who’s chief objective was speed & just getting it done. I guess the point is that like you, I was originally thinking “my invite designs are done! Now they just print them and I put them in the mail” but then a flood of questions suddenly came up that I had to deal with before I could actually mail them, which was a great surprise to me because it seems like you could just “mail them” but in reality that itself takes many steps and decisions, no matter how tiny they are.

I’m with girl on the addressing of the invite. I chose other, b/c Mr. and Mrs. Smith wasn’t quite formal enough. It would be Mr. and Mrs William Smith (presumabley Bill’s full name is William).

Inside will say Mr. and Mrs. Smith and on the next line Robert and Susan if they had kids.

I forgot to also add that yes, you can go cheap, and yes most people will just throw the invitation away, but for your guests who can’t make it, or like my relatives overseas for instance, this is the one impression they get of your wedding. This might just be me, but I would probably give a nicer present to someone who had a nice invitation because it tells me something about what the wedding was like.

outer envelopes say
“Mr and Mrs John Doe”

outer envelopes say “Mr & Mrs Jacob Smith” with the kids names below “William, Jonathan and Jane”. except in the instance of a few super large families where we went with “The Jacob Smith Family” instead of adding a third line of kids names.

Our envelopes read Jane & John Smith which I realize is less formal but even if we were going for formal I’d stay away from Mr. & Mrs. John Smith. I know a lof of people who find it offensive that only the Mr.’s First name is included. Perhaps Mr. & Mrs. Smith or add both first names. Just some feedback I heard from several co-workers recently.