I have never seen this done before but I know some ladies on here have. I haven't seen anything about this recently though.

With my circle of friends is it considered incredibly tacky to invite people to "parts" of a wedding and not the whole thing.

Maybe try a google search for "wedding invitation wording". That is how I found the wording for my invites.

i was just thinking of casual word-of-mouth or email invites. i don't want to give official-looking printed invites to people we can't afford to invite for dinner. we're only doing this for our extended network of work friends, so a verbal or e-vite is appropriate.

i'll probably phrase it as "if you would like to join us later on in the evening for some drinks and dancing, we'd love to see you!"

i don't know...something about starting off an invitation with an excuse just doesn't seem right to me.

Are these dance-only guests online? I've been invited to the dance portion of weddings before (for co-workers, etc). I don't find it tacky if it's not someone you're not super close to, sometimes it's just nice to be invited. However, a paper invite might be a bit too formal for an invite to the dance. To keep it informal, my friend sent out an evite (or a facebook? can't remember) inviting everyone to come dance it up with them after supper.

We did a simple postcard size invite and I did not make it as formal of wording as my ceremony invitations. I had a swirly-type design on the paper so that it was a bit nicer looking. We didn't invite the dance-only guests to the ceremony though so all that was required on the invitations was the reception information (not sure if you're doing the same). We were in kind of a funny situation because in my family dance-only is unheard of but in DH's family dance-only invitations are common and expected, some people would have been offended if we didn't invite them to the dance.

Ours said something along these lines, can't find the actual wording I used:

We invite you to join us
on *date* at *time*
for an evening of music, dancing, and friends
in celebration of our marriage

*Location and Address*

This is quite common where m FH is from - a rural area where everyone knows each other so there are lots of people to invite, but smaller venues that limit the number of people you can actually feed. I had never heard of it, but in some areas it is quite common.

I think people usually just do two separate invites. One that lists the ceremony, dinner and reception with timing/location, and the other is the same, but simply omits the info about dinner.

I will also add we put the time for our reception-only guests as a half hour later than when we planned on dancing to start. In case dinner ran late I didn't want food on the tables when more people started arriving.

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