Posts Tagged ‘Invitation wording’


Part two of our DIY invites adventure… catch up HERE.

YAY! Our invites turned out wonderful! I am a graphic artist by trade so, naturally, I wanted to design our invites from scratch. For months I poured over tons of ready-made design ideas looking for things that I loved and things that I hated. It is totally overwhelming the sheer number of invite designs that are out there! I knew I had three criteria to start with: they had to be square (because we already bought the paper) they had to incorporate our damask theme, and they had to be blue & brown.

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A little traditional in your wedding planning? A young couple (or a young couple of poor students) with generous families? Classic or formal?

Alex and I could fit into all those categories, and our wedding invitations reflect that. While we have still yet to pick out invitations/wording for our CA wedding, our UK invitations will be ordered any day now. As we’re a reletively young couple (25, and almost 25, respectively) and both full-time postgrad students, our change jar is only so deep. Thankfully, we have parents who are willing to help out, chip in, and make possible our simple, meaningful dual wedding dreams in every way they can. We wanted to honor their financial and guiding role in our wedding day so Alex and I have gone for a rather formal, classic introduction of ‘The joyful parents of…’ (stolen from my friends’ wedding invites where both the bride and the grooms’ parents were paying for the wedding).

We also wanted to reflect the legal aspect of our wedding by using ‘civil partnership’ (term for same-sex unions in the UK) in our invitations wording instead of wedding, marriage, union, ceremony, etc, etc. ‘Civil partnership’ is clunky, but it’s legit, baby, and we’re proud of it. (This will probably change for our CA wedding, however, as unless the US Supreme Court decides to throw down some civil rights briefs, it ain’t gonna be a legal hitchin beneath the Siskiyou mountains.)

We’ve also got two versions of invitations because only some people will be invited to the ceremony as the hotel is a rather small venue and our reception venue can accomodate more of our friends. So, the second version people is for ‘reception only’ guests.

As for RSVP cards, we’re postcarding it up! Only one envelope total (carrying both invite and RSVP) and we’ve yet to come up with a quirky way to to say ‘Yay’ or ‘Nay.’ Still, I’m stoked about postcard RSVPs for a number of reasons. 1) Less paper = more trees on the planet 2) cheaper postage 3) quotes & pictures on one side 4) I really, really like postcards.

Other than that, we’ve basically gone with the usual display of date/time/place as modeled by our stationers, baumbirdy on Etsy. Pretty straightforward, we thought, but you can check it out and if you’ve got any other suggestions, send them our way!

Invitation Wording:

The Joyful Parents of

Alexandra Grace Crisp

and

Erica Marie Gillingham

invite you to join in the celebration of
the civil partnership of their daughters on
Saturday, the Seventeenth of April Two Thousand & Ten
at Twelve Thirty in the Afternoon
(Venue), (City)


and, for the reception only guests:

The Joyful Parents of

Alexandra Grace Crisp

and

Erica Marie Gillingham

invite you to join in the reception of
the civil partnership of their daughters on
Saturday, the Seventeenth of April Two Thousand & Ten
at Five O’clock in the Evening
(Venue), (City)


Clementine Invitation by Baumbirdy on Etsy

Clementine Invitation by Baumbirdy on Etsy

invitations_small

image courtesy SXC

When I told Liz that I would be writing a blog entry about same-sex wedding invitation wording, she wrinkled her nose. “What do you mean? Is it any different from a heterosexual invitation?”

In her defense, I had been poking at invitations longer than she had. And to date she’d been looking at colors, designs, paper and costs. She had yet to start fiddling with some of the websites that let you customize the wording. In fact, I’m not even sure she’d read the wording on any of the invitations she’d considered.

I pulled up a website I had frequented and showed her an example: “Mr. & Mrs. So-and-So request your presence at the marriage of their daughter First Middle to Mr. First Middle Last.” She sighed and nodded. “Oh, right, I’ve seen that.” The site I used for my example lets you customize, but the selections are:

  • Both Parents Hosting
  • Bride’s Parents Hosting
  • Couple Hosting
  • Couple with Parents Hosting
  • Groom’s Parents Hosting

Well, we’re “one bride’s parents hosting with the other bride’s parent helping out here and there,” quite frankly. And to make things a bit more confusing, my step-dad and I don’t have the same last name. So, what are we doing? Finding a company that let’s you truly customize your invitation wording or that doesn’t assume all marriages are one man and one woman, for one thing. And then we are using something to the effect of:

Jan (Lastname1)
&
Winnie and Bruce (Lastname2)
invite you to the wedding of their daughters
Elizabeth Aline (Lastname2)
and
Michelle Raven (Lastname3)
Saturday, the twentyfifth of September
Two thousand and ten
at four o’clock in the afternoon

Now if we can just find that perfect “birds in a tree” themed invitation, letterpressed in cornflower blue and sage green with chocolate brown wording….

cherry blossom gocco invitation

Photo by Kathryn Rotondo

We are a long way from sending out invitations. But when the time comes, I’m planning to print our invites on my new gocco (screen printer) using some of Ginger’s artwork. I am thinking of using cherry blossoms as the inspiration for the invites beacuse they are one of my favorite things about April in Maryland. But, definitely not pink (Ginger has already nixed all things pink for the wedding). While I was looking at our different options for invite wording, I found these links really helpful: Wedding wording that won’t make you barf on Offbeat Bride and this thread on Indie Bride. Initially, I thought it would be tricky to find the right wording for a queer wedding. But, it ended up being pretty straight forward. Because our parents are helping us host the wedding, I want to be sure to include them in the invite wording. So, I’m planning to start off with “together with their parents.” And, I’m a minimalist when it comes to this stuff, so I prefer simple wording, and Ginger does too. This is what I have come up with:

Together with their parents
Ginger & Wasabi
invite you to celebrate
their marriage
on the second of April
two thousand eleven
at the American Visonary Art Museum
at six o’clock in the evening
Dinner and dancing to follow

I’m a gocco addict. I gocco’d my own invitations for my wedding(which I now tell everyone to never ever do- waaaaay more work than I could have even dreamed of). Heather Jeany, one of our amazing pro-gay vendors on our site, does mostly gocco invitations that are on the funky/fun side of things. She was kind enough to share some on the invitations she has done for gay couples in the past:

gay-wedding-invitation

lesbian-wedding-invitation

Invitation wording has been harder than I expected for some reason.  We’re just ordering our invites online (they aren’t something that falls high on our priority list so we’re going for simple, cheap, and already addressed since both of us have terrible handwriting), so I’ve been trawling through option after option for wording suggestions.

They seem to fall into three categories: super-religious—

“We request the honour of your presence as we celebrate the love we’ve found and are united for eternity in Christ”

Way too cutesy-

“Our course is set, it’s full speed ahead; we’re sailing toward, the day we’ll be wed!”,

or fairly straightforward (we’re going that route).

The difficulty has been deciding how to actually word a few key points. First: parents. Both of our sets of parents are divorced.  Mine have each remarried, while Lynn’s mother has a long-time partner and her father is currently single.  Some of them are contributing to the wedding financially, and all of them will be present to support us and help out, so we want to acknowledge them.  But listing all of those names is ridiculous, so we’ve opted for the generic-but-inclusive ‘together with their parents’ line.

Then there is the murky so-called etiquette code of what you are being invited to, exactly.  I read something that told me an invitation requesting “the honour of your presence” is for a wedding in a church, which isn’t the case for us, so it’ll be “the pleasure of your company” which is more what we’re hoping for anyway.  We’d rather enjoy the pleasure than the hono[u]r, in the end.

And finally, the part that took the longest to decide: what to call the thing.  Should we call it a wedding? A commitment ceremony?  A ‘celebration of our love’?  Our ‘special day’?  I was worried that some of our relatives might be offended by us calling it a wedding, but then I realized that I would be more offended by anyone having that reaction.  Since it is a wedding, that’s what we’re going to call it.  Anyone who has an issue with that fact can choose not to come, but I don’t want to make things more palatable for any closeted bigots in the family—especially at our expense (both literally and emotionally).  Honestly, this is one of those things that I think we worry about a lot but that in the end probably isn’t a big deal at all.  Straight people ask people to “celebrate their union”, watch them “get hitched”, and all sorts of weird permutations and no one wonders whether they’re having a wedding or not.  I need to remember to give people the benefit of the doubt and try to assume that they’ll have no trouble understanding our invitations, either.

After that, the rest was pretty straightforward: date, time, and location.  So, putting it all together we got:

Together with their parents

Emily Kate and Lynn

request the pleasure of your company

at their wedding

on Saturday, the twenty-seventh of February

two thousand and ten

at four-thirty in the afternoon

(address)