Weddingbee Blog

AKA, the envelope details…

Here are what our pretty light blue envelopes look like all nekkid. So… this story is about my first epic fail, which could have been disastrous, but ended well.

Along with all things paper, I am also obsessed with calligraphy. I LOVE IT. I want to eat it, it is soooo yummy looking! Anyways. Obviously, at $2+ a pop, getting our envelopes professionally calligraphed was NOT feasible. Not even close. And printer labels were not an option to me. Because I’m crazy. So, OF COURSE, I, being the DIY-overachieving-crazy-bride-forgot-that-I-am-in-grad-school-and-doesn’t-even-have-super-nice-handwriting girl that I am, decided to tackle this monster. BAD BAD BAAAAAAAAD IDEAR! (That R is there on purpose, BTW.)

So I enrolled in the Copperplate calligraphy class at PaperSource. I got this cool bottle of black ink and this cool odd-looking pen which is conducive to Copperplate and Spencerian writing, which was included in my tuition of $55. The class was pretty fun - it was nice to have someone demonstrate how to actually write the letters, but I do think I could have self-taught. Seriously. It’s a nice basic intro class.

Once I received my envelopes, I made myself a template, which I slipped inside the envelopes to help me write in straight lines (which I can’t do for the life of me EVEN WITH THE TEMPLATE!).

Then I settled down with a DVD of Friends, and got to working. I probably practiced each address 4 times before I put inked nib to envelope. I busted out about 35-ish envelopes in 5+ hours. My hand was cramped, my eyes were tired, and I had to stop to study…. so I had laid the envelopes all over the dining room table to dry. And when I stopped to take it all in, I felt my world crumbling around me.

OK, so perhaps that was a bit over-dramatic. But here is one of my better envelopes. And while it may appear to be nice, note that I took this picture AT AN ANGLE on purpose. Like I said, I can’t write in a straight line to save my life. My letters weren’t evenly spaced or sized… it was a disaster. I think I can write single letters fine - on practice paper. But connecting letters is not my forte. I can write a really pretty “Mr & Mrs”. That’s all.

At this point, I felt like crying my little eyes out because I had only ordered 25-30 extra envelopes to account for my mistakes and I had just slaved over these envelopes for NO REASON. And there was NOOOOO way I was giving these to ANYBODY, not even boys. Anyways, luckily for me, Kristin of Twin Ravens had some “goof” envelopes that she hadn’t sent to me because of these minuscule barely visible little ink smudges - so she sent them to me, not even knowing about the calligraphy crisis!!! Crisis averted!

Anyways, I ended up printing all 210+ envelopes on my computer. And because my laptop (before it pooped out on me) was being stupid, I couldn’t even copy and paste and had to type each address out. TWICE. SIGHHHHHH. This is the final result:

I’m really happy with how they turned out. They’re all evenly spaced out, and perfect. And beautiful. Much more fitting than my failed calligraphy. Can I point out the realllllly cute little heart symbol I used between the city and state? ANNNND the fact that I got to space out the zip code numbers? Hooray for happy endings and obsessions with odd little details that no one else cares about! As I continue to remind Mr. Ramen, I’m not doing it to impress anyone—the little details make ME happy. (Uh, sorry if that came off a tad Bridezilla…)

I also wanted to take a moment to point out the ADORABLE postage stamp frame that Mr. Ramen designed. We measured stamps to make sure that the dot frame would be visible. Why? I don’t know, because it’s fun? We also wanted to make sure our invites were standard weight so we could use our Forever stamps that we bought before the postage increase. Ghetto? Perhaps, but we saved a nice little pile of moolah by doing so. That means we can afford to eat on the honeymoon! Woo hoo!

Here are almost all 210 of my babies ready to be sent off into the real world!!! *proud tear*

I grabbed my box and headed to my local USPO - where seriously, I think all the best mail persons work. Minus this one nasty grumpy dude. But the rest of them rock! BTW, isn’t the outside really pretty? I was too shy to ask anyone to take a photo of me outside. I know, pathetic.

I kinda felt like it is this wedding rite of passage to hand cancel your stamps. To be honest… I didn’t care either way. HAH! I have heard that they sometimes get run through machines even if you hand cancel, but when I had stopped by to buy postage for the postcards, one of the clerks (I loooove her! Thanks Susan!) told me that she would let me use her stamp and hand cancel our invites. So, I did it for the experience. It was kinda fun! But then again, I like to stamp things. As a kid, I wanted to be a librarian, mostly because I wanted to stamp the book cards. Then, fancy computers happened. But back to the invites…

I wasn’t sure if it was OK to take pictures of the process, and like most of my wedding errands, I was flying solo. So here are all of my babies, hand-canceled and on their way!

Were you able to partake in the hand-canceling rite? Did you experience any almost-catastrophic setbacks with your invites?