You are engaged to the love of your life; the wedding place has been decided upon, the reception hall has been chosen and booked, the cake has been picked out, the caterer has been contacted, and you have found the perfect wedding dress.

Now, all you need are guests to come to your dream wedding. You most likely decided on the number of guest you wished to invite before you booked the reception hall and have started making a list of who to invite.

It is time to start working on your wedding invitations.

Who To Invite

Invite whomever you want, don't let your parents force you to invite their friends; like the woman who babysat you once when you were 3-weeks old and who you haven't seen since, your great-aunt 5 times removed whom you've never met, or the perverted old boss that your father is trying to impress.

It is your wedding and you should only invite those people whom you want to share your special day with.

Ideally, it should be a shared event between the bride and groom to be. In many cases, it is left up to the bride and her friends to make out and send the wedding invitations.

A wedding invitation should include most of those well-worn journalistic rules; who, what, when, where, why. List the names of the bride and groom to be, mention they are getting married, mention the date of the wedding, and mention where the wedding is being held. The why can remain unstated, let the invitees wonder that amongst themselves.

Some wedding invitations also include a phrase mentioning that the parents of the bride and groom would like to announce the wedding of their children. If you wish you can include an RSVP at the bottom of the invitation and give the location and time of the reception, or you can include that information on a separate card. A return envelope should also be included, stamped if possible.

You can use store-bought invitations, custom-made invitations, or design and print your own from your computer; it all depends on what kind of budget you have to work with. Custom-made invitations can cost you a lot of money. Store-bought ones can be nice but can look cheap and unappealing. If you do use store-bought ones, find someone who can write neatly and artistically to fill them in. The ones you print from home can be as simple or as fancy as you wish. You do have to buy the card-stock to print them on. You can find many templates and instructions online to help you, Avery has easy-to-follow instructions for making wedding invitations from their vellum overlay cards. If you do chose to make or write out your own invitations, make sure everything is spelled correctly and don't write in netspeak. While most people won't really care what they look like, it is only polite to take care in the planning of your wedding invitations.

You should send out your invitations six to eight weeks before the wedding. This gives our guests plenty of time to plan and it gives them plenty of time to return their RSVP's. If you are inviting people from out of the country, you should probably send out their invitations sooner.