9 Useful Ways to Store Wedding Day Memorabilia

Your wedding celebration entails careful and detailed planning, considering it is one of the most important and happiest moments of your life. By the time your wedding day rolls around, you’ll likely have spent a year or more preparing and looking forward to it.
But all this careful organisation is leading up to one single day, which will fly by in the blink of an eye. And after the wedding is over, that’s it – guests will go home, you’ll settle into married life, and all that’s left are the photos and memories.

Fortunately, there are several ways to store memorabilia and treasures from your wedding day that will help them last for a lifetime. Growing old with your partner, you both can look back through these preserved wedding keepsakes. Here’s our guide to some of the most useful and beautiful ways to store wedding-day mementos.

1. Make a Wedding Time Capsule

A time capsule is a creative and unique way to preserve memories of your wedding. Have a time capsule at your wedding reception and ask your guests to fill it with messages that you can store and open on your preferred date – for example, your first, fifth, or tenth wedding anniversary. You can also add additional mementos such as:

1) Wedding photos
2) Leftover favours
3) Copies of the speeches
4) Your cake topper
5) The cork from your toasting champagne
6) A spare wedding invitation

Commercially available time capsules are designed for durability, to keep your memories fresh and protected for the years to come. These time capsules also come with kits with stickers, tags or labels, envelopes, and a sealing strip.
Relive every little detail from your big day when you open your time capsule. But make sure not to get too excited and peek earlier than your agreed-upon date!

2. Keep a Bottle of Wine or Champagne

Almost everyone serves wine or champagne at their wedding. And since alcoholic drinks can be kept for many years without spoiling (in fact, many people view them as tasting better when they’re older), they make an ideal memento to keep from your wedding day.
Choose a leftover bottle of wine or champagne from your wedding, and keep it to enjoy on your fifth, tenth, or twentieth wedding anniversary.

Have this favourite bottle signed by your guests to make it more special – or use a personalised wine bottle label.
Vintage wines last about 10-20 years, so these are the best choices if you intend to keep them for a long time. You can store the wine in a beautiful wooden wine box until then! (Hint: Red wines last longer than whites, and preserve best when kept in a cool room.)

3. Use a Wedding Keepsake Box

For any wedding-related décor or accessories that you don’t want to throw away, or you’re just not sure what to do with, a wedding keepsake box is ideal. These boxes are designed to look beautiful and preserve any little odds and ends you may have kept from your wedding day, such as:

1) Spare wedding stationery
2) Buntings or table decorations
3) Leftover wedding favours or favour boxes
4) Your wedding shoes
5) Jewellery or accessories that you wore on the wedding day, such as your hairpiece
6) Artificial flowers
7) Your guest book or photo album

This Always and Forever Gold Foil Keepsake Box is particularly special because the lid can hold your favourite wedding photo. It looks beautiful tied with a golden ribbon to keep your things safe.

4. Preserve Your Dress

Your dress is one of the highlights of your wedding day, and probably the most important thing you want to keep. After all, your wedding dress probably took up a lot of your budget (including alterations) so that you would look stunning and feel wonderful on your big day. Naturally, after the ceremony, you don’t want to leave it crumpled in your closet.
After the wedding, it is best to have your wedding dress professionally cleaned as the first step in preserving your gown. Then, commission the services of a gown preserver.

However, you can preserve your wedding gown yourself if you choose not to hire a professional preserver.
Once it’s been dry-cleaned, carefully wrap it in clean, acid-free, and colour-free tissue paper. Place layers of tissue paper between the folds of your gown to maintain its shape.

Finally, store the wedding gown in an air-tight container away from direct sunlight. Keep it away from damp places with little air circulation, like the attic or basement, to avoid mould and mildew growth

Another way to keep your wedding gown is through framing. Professional services for shadow boxing are available to clean, press, and preserve your gown in a beautiful display case.
Either method of preservation is a great investment, especially if you have plans to pass on your wedding dress to a family member.

5. Frame Your Wedding Stationery

Everyone knows you can store and display your favourite wedding pictures in beautiful, elegant photo frames throughout your home.
However, frames aren’t only for photos! They’re also a great way of preserving and displaying things like:

1) A spare wedding invitation or save the date
2) Your table plan
3) A printed or handwritten record of your wedding vows
4) The lyrics to your first dance song
5) Wedding cards you received from your loved ones

Frames are available in a huge variety of colours, themes, sizes, and finishes that will perfectly match your style and home décor.

6. Get a Certificate Holder

Your wedding certificate is one of the most important mementos from your wedding day. It might only be a piece of paper, but it’s proof that you’ve married the love of your life, and can now call each other husband or wife!
So, rather than stuffing your certificate away in a filing cabinet, why not store it in an elegant wedding certificate holder? The treasured document will be safe inside from sun damage, and you can display the elegant box on your mantle to add to your home décor.

7. Press Your Wedding Flowers

With its beauty and colour, no one wants to just throw away their wedding bouquet. If you’ve chosen an artificial bouquet, you can store it just like anything else – but what about real flowers, that eventually wilt and die?
The good thing is, you don’t have to throw them away. You can:

1) Press your wedding flowers, then keep them in a book or display them in a frame
2) Hang them upside-down and air-dry them, then arrange them as dried flowers in a vase
3) Submerge them in silica gel
4) Dip in wax
5) Or even select a few flowers to use in a resin paperweight.

Flower preservation can be a tricky and painstaking process – and if it goes wrong, your flowers will start to rot. For peace of mind, you can hire a professional flower preserver. This will not only save your time and energy but also ensure that you have beautiful flowers for the years to come.

8. Display Your Wedding Veil

You have thought of preserving your wedding dress but what about your wedding veil? What’s going to happen to it after the big day? You’re never going to use it again, and while tradition dictates that you might save it for your own child’s wedding, chances are it will look outdated and old-fashioned by the time you want to pass it on.
Most brides have not thought about this, but your wedding veil can be a great piece of art. Why not choose a wedding photo you love, have it framed or put in a shadow box, and then use your veil to surround the photo, transforming it into elegant art?

9. Frame Your Guest Book

A wedding guest book is, traditionally, a book in which your guests will all sign their names – so that you can remember who attended your special day. A guest book is a beautiful wedding memento that you’ll be able to store forever just by keeping it in a cool, dry place away from sunlight.
However, if you’re looking for an alternative that you’ll be able to have on display, there are many modern guest book alternatives out there. For example, this Square Drop Top Wooden Frame Guest Book can be hung on a wall or displayed on a shelf just like a photo.

Extra Tips for Storing Wedding Mementos

If you have been married recently or will soon be wed, you are likely to be doing your research on ways to shore wedding-day mementos. Whether it is a specially ordered custom item or a few wedding presents you want to forever cherish, here are some tips -

1. While wedding keepsakes are important, not everything must be preserved. Don’t feel the need to keep absolutely everything, down to the leftover napkins – you won’t have the space, for a start! Only pick what you consider the most special to you to have it stored and protected.
2. If you have the artistic and creative skills, you have the option to DIY. However, some wedding items are extremely delicate and need careful handling. A specialist will have a unique approach according to the item you want to preserve, making sure it will last a lifetime.
3. Before committing to push through with the service, thoroughly make your research about the company’s experience and reputation.

Doing so will give you the peace of mind that there will be no damage during the preservation process.
Properly stored wedding-day memorabilia will help you to remember every part of your special day and look back on it whenever you feel sentimental.

One more thing: after your wedding day is over, don’t forget to send thank you cards to everyone that spent the day with you or helped you celebrate in some way. Your guests will be able to keep their wedding invitations and thank you cards as special mementos of their very own!