Wedding: Couture wedding invitations with Bell’Invito

I’m a paper snob! I admit it. I love rich, thick, high quality paper and print work. So when it came time to do the wedding invitations, there was only one place to go – Bell’Invito. Today’s post continues the WEDDING series with how to pick your wedding invitations, including a few etiquette pointers with owner Heather Alexander Wiese.

If you haven’t met Heather Alexander Wiese, you need to. She is a modern-day Emily Post and a total brainiac when it comes to any printed goods. Her company Bell’Invito produces some of the most magnificent invitations, holiday cards, stationary, couture pieces and digital bespoke that you have ever seen. How fortunate for us that she is right her in Dallas, although she handles orders around the world.

I have already detailed for you how we did our Save the Dates (click here for blog post) so when it came time do select our invitations I knew I would work with Heather. The monogram was already complete and we sat down to discuss colors, size and what we wanted to communicate with the invitation. To me, the entire wedding and reception start with this elegant printed piece. You are setting the tone for the event with your invitations and every little detail matters.

Heather and I met in her showroom and she was so generous with her time. I’m a visual person so I have to see, tough and feel the paper and printed samples to understand what our end goal was. You are creating a wedding invitation suite with several pieces so thoughtful consideration goes into each piece. Heather walked me through what would work best for Taylor and Jeff. After I made a few selections, the Bell’Invito team e-mailed me several proofs giving me font style and color selections.They make the process very easy.

Heather is also an etiquette expert having written numerous articles that have been published. We went over several key points in our meeting but she also keeps these on her site for reference which is super helpful. I always learn something by looking at this site.

I’ll give you a couple of pointers that I learned through this process. For example, if you are having a seated dinner at the reception, you only list “Dinner” on the invitation. It is inferred that the dinner is seated (duh!);  you would not write “Seated Dinner”. So our invitations read “Dinner and Dancing”. You do not list a wedding website on a formal invitation. Nor do you cite the hashtag that your bride and groom are using. It’s a no-no! Those items were listed on the ‘Save The Date’.

Remember in the Save the Date blog post how I told you that the first thing you need to do is compile the guest list? Well, that guest list continues to be one of the most important parts of this process. Here’s a little trick that Heather taught me. With a pencil, lightly number the back of the reply card. Mark that same number on the guest list that you use as your master list. When someone mails back their reply card without their name (yes, this happens) you will be able to identify who it is by looking at the number on the back and match it to your numbered master list. Genius!

We are beyond ecstatic with how the invitations turned out.  Bell’Invito outdid themselves and I highly recommend them for all your printing needs!  xoxo – Tanya

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photo: Mary Hafner

This blog post done in collaboration with Bell’Invito. All opinions are my own.