Sending and Organizing our Wedding Invitations

By jeff | June 2, 2009

A month or so ago we actually sent our wedding invitations in the mail. The process was somewhat arduous but in the end we managed to get 150 envelopes out the door and the response cards have been trickling in ever since.

The sanity-saver in all this is that I happen to have Microsoft Office so we were able to use an Excel-Word mail merge to properly format the addresses so when it came time to print the envelopes I only had to feed them through the printer one at a time.

Preparing our guest list in Excel

To get started I created a new Excel spreadsheet using a template my brother in-law created for his wedding a few years ago. The key to the spreadsheet is that you want to prepare it for a mail merge so that you can print the envelopes without writing out each and every address.

The columns I suggest:
  1. Number
  2. Status (sent / replied)
  3. Regular Names (John, Joe, Mary, etc.)
  4. Envelope Name(s) i.e. "Mr. and Mrs. John and Jane Doe"
  5. Street Address
  6. Address 2 (for Apartment Number, Suite, Flat, Unit, Etc.)
  7. City
  8. State
  9. ZIP
  10. # in party
  11. Beef (Replace these with your food options if it is per-plate)
  12. Chicken
  13. Vegetarian
We filled in this list and ended up with about 120 invitations to be sent, which would tally to approximately 240 people because of spouses, kids, etc.

Preparing the Word Template

Setting this up was tricky because our envelopes are not standard envelopes. We were lucky, however, that they had pretty large dimensions (8×8in. with the flaps open, 8×5in. flaps closed). I ran a few test pages on 8×11 inch paper and lined them up with our envelopes to make sure that the return address and mailing address information would print correctly.

Printing the Envelopes

I happen to have a Laser Printer at home so we fed the envelopes through the single-sheet feeder one at a time. The envelopes went through with mild bending. No creases but they got a little warped. However, once you stuff the invitations in the envelopes it will straighten things out. Overall it took about 2 hours to print out 150+ envelopes. Time consuming but at least we saved a few bucks instead of having the printers do it.

Things to put in the envelopes

Now is the time to make sure you have everything. Etiquette suggests that you do not explicitly say anything about gift registries or receiving money. To be as pseudo-polite as possible we included an extra slip of paper provided by our reception site that had driving instructions to the hotel that included the web address for our free wedding website provided by theknot.com. On theknot.com we have detailed driving and hotel booking instructions, our gift registries, and the story of how we met.

So, a list of everything we had for our invitations:
  • Primary envelope, with extra colored paper lining for effect. Nothing printed. 
  • Stamped response envelope with our mailing address printed on the front (costs extra)
  • Response cards. Make sure response cards asks for names, # of people attending, and the meal choice (if necessary). 
  • On the back of the response card, put a code number that corresponds to your Excel sheet just in case the response name is illegible.
  • Invitation card
  • Information card with driving instructions, hotel booking information, and website information.
A useful thing to remember when calculating the cost of your invitations is that you will need to have postage. Our invitations weighed more than 3 ounces so they consequently cost more than the standard first-class stamp (59 cents in 2009). You also should include a stamp on the response envelopes (44 cents in 2009). So for every invitation expect to add an additional $1 worth of postage. Including postage our invitations cost approximately $4 plus about 5 hours of our time to print addresses, stamp, and organize.

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