Weddingbee Blog

I know! These STD posts are never ending…seriously. It was that bad. When we left off, I mentioned that I sent one of the STDs to myself and one to Mama Hippo as a “test” before sending out to the whole group. Ummmm….wow. Best idea ever. Here’s why:

So…. apparently a sharpened pencil goes through an envelope pretty quickly. The same thing happened to Mama Hippo’s. DAMMMMMMMIIIIIITTTT!!!!! I don’t know why I didn’t think this would be a problem. I guess I was thinking that the cardstock backing was stiff enough that it wouldn’t bend and so the sharpened pencil wouldn’t be able to poke anything. Clearly, I was very wrong.

Mama Hippo and I immediately starting brainstorming possible fixes. The first option was to NOT sharpen the pencils. Problem was, I had already attached the sharpened pencils to the card. I had plenty of extra unsharpened pencils, but the thought of peeling off all the pencils and reattaching them (which also meant an extra trip to Michaels for more Glue Dots) sounded less-than-stellar. Also, I intentionally sharpened the pencils thinking that people would actually use them if they were already sharpened. I don’t have a pencil sharpener in my tiny apartment. If the unsharpened pencil were sent to me, it would have just sat around forever until I eventually threw it away. OK, so…yes, I’m sure that’s what will likely happen with most of the pencils, but I want to keep the illusion that people will peel the pencil off from the backing and start jotting notes with them right away, paying attention to our wedding date with every swirl of lead. Oh c’mon…humor me!

Mama Hippo suggested creating a barrier between the pencil and the envelope out of cardstock so that the pencil couldn’t poke through. The pencil only poked through where it was next to the envelope, not the cardstock, so theoretically, the cardstock was heavy enough to prevent the pencil poke. Luckily I had plenty of cardstock strip leftovers. I took the strips and cut them into smaller pieces, then used my handy dandy Martha Stewart scoring board to create a crease, so the card could wrap around the front of the card to cover the exposed part of the sharpened pencil and slip around the bottom of the backing.

Not wanting our guests to actually see this little jerry-rigged masterpiece, I used double-sided crafty tape on the largest side of the thingy, slid it oh so carefully into the envelope, and pressed to seal it to the inside of the envelope. When the card is pulled out, the cardstock barrier stays inside the bottom of the envelope, and no one is the wiser.

To make sure the cardstock barrier thingy worked out, I sent out a test STD to BM Angela and asked her to let me know about its condition when it arrived. And this time, I asked the post office to hand cancel it. A few days later I got this e-mail from her:

So I got the super cute save the date. I love it. But the envelope was torn where the pencil was and the lead had been broken.

Oh hell no! So frustrating. At this point, I was ready to just say f’ it, and send them out regardless if the envelope was going to tear or not. Seriously. I was that frustrated with the whole process. As a last ditch effort, I did a Google search for “pencil point protector” and found these:

Source

Eureka! Why hadn’t I thought of this before???!?? At a little over $0.11 a piece, I had to try it, so I sent another test STD to Mama Hippo, this time with the cardstock barrier thingy and the pencil point protector in place and asking the post office to hand cancel the stamp. And this time…this time…it finally arrived undamaged! I don’t love it with the pencil point protector thing on it, but it’s a necessary evil.

Even though I had planned to get the STDs out at the seven month mark, we didn’t actually get them out until right at month six due to the mailing issues. Who knew that making STDs would be so complicated??!?

Anyone else get their STDs out later than you planned?