Weddingbee Blog

Hi everybody! Today is a momentous day! Our invitations are finally going out!! Although I don’t want to post them here until our guests have received them (think end of this week), I thought I’d share the DIY pseudo-calligraphy I did (some of you seemed interested) and our adventures with stamps. Now, I’m not entirely convinced that anyone actually notices either of these two things, but we brides certainly do. So here we go.

First off, the calligraphy. I decided I wanted to get all fancy-pants, so I got a calligraphy pen and decided to try my hand at calligraphy. What did I discover? I suck at it. I can’t make all the little swirls and swooshes look good. Instead, I look like I am trying to be pretentious. So instead of addressing the envelopes using fancy calligraphy, I did two things: First, I just used the calligraphy pen with my regular handwriting. Then I added the one fancy pants calligraphy thing I really like, which is the spacing-out-of-the-zip-code (more on this in a moment).

Here is one of my envelopes:

Not all of my envelopes look like this, however. As some of you know, I like to be a Prepared Puff. I like to get things done as far ahead of time as possible, so as to reduce time-crunch induced stress. Thus, I have been addressing envelopes for a couple of months now. One of my earlier envelopes does not have the spaced-out zip code:

And one more…

How many of you have this issue? We have a couple that will be married in one month–after we send out our invitations, but before our wedding. So how does one address their envelope? I decided to address it to “the future Mr. and Mrs.”

As you may notice, I addressed this envelope to Mrs. Rachel and Mr. Nick Lastname. This was a decision I made long before I started addressing envelopes. I am totally opposed to the idea of the woman disappearing into her husband (ie, Mr. and Mrs. Nick Lastname), so this is what I came up with. Sometimes I put the woman’s name first, sometimes I put her name last. I totally don’t care how many etiquette rules I broke!

Okay, now moving on to the Stamp Issues. Well, they’re actually Post Office Issues, not just stamp issues. In order to keep our postage at 59 cents, I have redesigned our invitations THREE TIMES. I know every regulation like the back of my hand, and the postage situation really stresses me out because every time I go to the post office, I am told something different. Now, onto my long-ass story.

Our post office makes me miserable. I dread going there. It always takes at least a half an hour to get through the line, and once you get to the front, you are either faced with Lady Who Hates Life or Guy Who Doesn’t Mail Anything The Right Way. Lucky for me, the past three times I have gotten Lady Who Hates Life, who clearly hates weddings and wants me to have to mail all of my invitations parcel post.

Last week I went in to have them weigh the final invitation with the letterpress. Lady Who Hates Life set my invitation on the scale. I see that it weighs just under two ounces (thus, 59 cents). She looks at me and says, “why did you write the zip code like that?” I replied, “It’s calligraphy, they write it like that.” She tells me that the machines will not be able to read the envelope with a zip code like that, and I can’t mail it. I know that she is full of it–every time I go in there, she tells me something different which would require me to re-do all of my invitations.

Inevitably I go to USPS.com and find out that she is wrong. However, I also know that she is wrong about the zip code because I just received an invitation written like that (and don’t worry, I already tested it and the envelope got to its destination just fine). So I again ask her how much it will cost to mail my envelope, and she says, “$1.59.” There is absolutely no way that this envelope needs to be mailed parcel post, which is the price she was quoting me (I could see it on the screen). I asked her why it needed to be mailed parcel post, and she said, “because it’s too thick.” I made her put it through their little plastic slot thing that determines how thick is too thick, and despite her trying to hold it every which way to keep it from falling directly through the slot, it fell straight through. I asked her again how much it would cost to mail it, and she reluctantly said, “59 cents.” Then she gave me a look of death.

Her look of death haunted me. I was nervous about mailing them. What if she somehow was right? So I decided to get a second opinion. While I was visiting my parents in Oregon, I went to their local mail depot (not actually a post office). The two people there spent 15 minutes deliberating and ended up telling me they would be 96 cents each. I totally knew that was wrong, because their explanation made no logical sense, but Momma Puff bought the $1 stamps anyway. We drove by a real post office on the way to our next destination, and I made Momma Puff stop. This time, we got a very well-informed, nice postal worker who explained exactly why my invitations would cost only 59 cents to mail. However, we had all of these $1 stamps, and for some reason she wouldn’t return them.

And that, my friends, is how I ended up with postage that looks like this:

It’s not pretty, it’s not custom, and it cost $35 more for all of our postage than it should have. But you know what? I’m over it. I’m too sick of stamps to try to return them to the post office and get the right amount, and I’m convinced no one notices stamps anyway.

The one thing that does still bother me (I have to admit it) is the fact that we went to three different post offices and got three different answers. I do not understand how something like this can be so subjective! Shouldn’t it be easier than this?!

I wish I had some sort of solution for you guys. My only suggestion would be this: go to as many postal employees as it takes until you get the answer you want to hear (provided you actually know the regulations and know that you’re right).