The most difficult task in planning a wedding was finding a venue. The second most difficult task (for me) was researching proper wedding invitation verbiage. Why was this so difficult you may ask? Well, who knew there were so many different ways to skin a cat! If you come from a divorced family (which 50% of us do these days) it changes the traditional format. Of course, there are no strict rules to this. If you're having a casual wedding you can write whatever you'd like. However, if you're having a more formal affair (which I am), then I think it's safe to safe people have expectations that the wording will reflect that. Here's one tid-bit I learned from my research: I learned that if your parents are divorced, their names should each go on their own line (mother's name first). If both sets of parents are contributing to the wedding you'd say "together with." I was surprised by how many questions came up for me while planning out my invites. Here are just a few:

1. When do invitations go out to guests?
2. When should the RSVP be due?
3. If everyone is contributing to the wedding, how do we phrase that on the invitation?
4. How much detailed info should be on the invite? Do we need an insert or should we just direct them to the website?
5. Should we include an insert RSVP for the rehearsal dinner?
6. How do we make the wording formal and important without sounding too stuffy?
7. We haven't had our food tasting yet, but we need to get the invites out.... should we include meal (type) options? i.e. meat or fish?

Here are some sites I found useful for answering all of my questions and helped with guidelines in creating the ideal wedding invitation wording for us:

• Invitation Consultants
• Martha Stewart
• Emily Post
• Beau-Coup

And now for a sneak peek at our wedding invites created by LIZELLY at LizzyBLoves, an invitation and stationary design studio.

We have not gone to print yet, so these are just PDF designs.... but you'll get the idea for what we're going for. And you'll get to see the wedding wording we came up with that made all of the moms happy ;-)

Looking forward to sharing the final product with you soon! Lizelly has been amazing in creating a custom wedding invitation that fits the vibe and theme of what we're going for. I can't wait to get them soon!!!

How was your invitation experience? Did you go the custom route? What challenges did you have (if any)? Please share!