There are few things more moving than a SF wedding. This larger than life metropolis featuring its eclectic buildings, dazzling bays and hills, museums, art galleries and cutting-edge dining establishments is the ideal city to host a wedding event. SF is known as a city with personality and its vitality is demonstrated in a surprisingly never ending amount of places to host a wedding.

Creating your San Francisco wedding and reception is a matter of context. With a town full of customs, spectacular locations and inherent vitality, it is wise to feature those components into your over-all wedding design. Employing your location wisely helps create a unforgettable wedding event and may often be the concept for the wedding event itself.

As an example, your San Francisco wedding invitation could feature one of the many city motifs or its surroundings to draw appreciation of the place of the wedding event. Case in point, one can makes use of Grace Cathedral, Napa Valley, Conservancy of Flowers to serve as the central concept for a wedding. The use of natural settings, buildings or monuments may serve as a useful design to showcase your wedding.

The fact is, selecting well-known points of interest can be quite a helpful organizing concept to plan your wedding ceremony. Integrating these motifs with your save the date card, wedding invitation, reply card set, directions card, place cards, table cards and menu can connect together many disparate activities to provide your wedding a genuinely cohesive theme.

Your wedding invitation and supporting wedding papers, if used efficiently, can produce a sense of excitement and expectation that most other styles of social communication just cannot match. As text messaging, e-mail and blog posts on social networking platforms become the prevalent form of communication, it’s comforting to receive paper correspondence. It provides a feeling of intimacy that other types of communication simply can’t equal.

When you approach your wedding, think about using your natural environment or prominent town landmarks to provide a personalized touch to your wedding papers.

Sheila May is a founding member of the Stationers Guild. She writes frequently about letterpress wedding invitations, save the date cards and wedding thank you notes.

When it comes to wedding invitations, there are certain questions that are asked quite frequently. The goal of this article is to briefly answer several of them:

• Where to buy invitations for a wedding?  Brick and mortar print shops and bridal retail stores have been around for years providing brides with access to those large wedding stationery books that can be viewed on premise or maybe even checked out to take home. A much more convenient option has become popular in the last few years thanks to the Internet and online shopping offered by many retailers of invitations. You can shop their vast online inventories when it fits YOUR schedule. Gone are the days when you were required to leave your house to do your wedding invitation shopping. If you are shopping online, it is recommended that you order samples before making your final selection and then request an online proof before the final printing. Even if it costs more, it’s worth it to have peace of mind.

• How to make wedding invitations? Making your own invitations for a wedding can range from using a complete DIY kit to using online templates or software programs for printing them on a computer printer. Here’s the question to ask yourself…will this really save you money? As the saying goes, time is money, and how much time will you be spending by creating your own not to mention the possible frustration. Most couples don’t realize that having invitations professionally printed doesn’t have to mean more cost. Printers actually have many quite affordable designs that are beautiful not to mention the time you are saving by having them do the set-up work and printing while you devote your time to other tasks until they are delivered to your door.
   
• How to write wedding invitations? The most important details that need to be listed in your wording are your names as the wedding couple; time of your ceremony, day of the week, month, date and year; and the name and physical address of the location. The time and location of your reception may or may not be included directly on your invitation depending on space. A separate card can be enclosed to share your reception details if space is limited. The invitation should be worded as coming from whoever is paying for the wedding or hosting. This could be you and your fiance or parents.Even if not hosting, parents’ names can be listed if you so choose. Any special wording or verse is up to you since there is an abundance of samples available online.
   
• How to address wedding invitations?  Addressing invitations really depends on how many envelopes will be used to mail each one. Traditionally, they came with inner and outer envelopes. The inner envelope being left unsealed with all the invitation pieces enclosed and is addressed to the specific names of guests invited from that household. The mailing envelope is the outer or larger envelope which is handwritten with the guests’ formal names and address. More modern wedding invitations now include only one mailing envelope so all specific guest names should appear on there along with the address. Some invitations don’t actually come with a mailing envelope but instead have an outside wrap that folds around the invitation pieces to become its own mailing piece. No matter how many envelopes, everything is written in the same handwriting and ink color with no abbreviations except for non-professional titles such as Mr., Mrs., Jr., etc. All numbers should appear in numeric format. It is also suggested that all hand addressing be done before the envelopes are stuffed. Including a pre-printed return address on your wedding invitations will ensure the return of any that are undeliverable.
   
• When to mail wedding invitations?  It is suggested that invitations should be mailed a minimum of 4-6 weeks before your wedding date directly at a Post Office location and all at the same time. This is unless your wedding is planned around a holiday or if it will take place at an away destination. In these cases, guests will appreciate having more time to plan and possibly make necessary travel arrangements. You may even consider sending out save the date cards 4-6 months ahead of your invitations to give guests even more preparation time.

We’ve only covered here what are probably the most frequently asked questions about wedding invitations. There are many more resources you will find online that will be helpful as you shop for, design, order, assemble, address, and mail your wedding invites.