So because our invitations weren’t something I was happy about, I started to look for other ways to make them a bit more “fun”—and that meant stalking the Royal Mail website.
Originally, I had found these personalised stamps which looked really awesome. Except, although you could add your own photo (like Mrs. Turkey did with their logo), you had to choose one of the existing stamps to go along with it—and they just weren’t to my taste. Boo.
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Plus, they were also £1. First class stamps have now gone up to SIXTY PENCE (90 cents), which is utterly ridiculous and I absolutely refuse to pay a quid for a stamp just because it’s got a funny picture on it.
Next.
The time has come, hive! I’m revealing our invitations today! But before I do, I have to do two things.
First, if you’re doing the math in your head thinking “But, Otter, it’s only the end of January. Why are you sending your invitation so early?” Well hive, by now it has already happened, but on the day we went to get our invitations weighed, we were informed that postage rates were about to go up. While we had to put the extra amount on the return RSVP card, I wasn’t paying for extra postage to delay sending the invitations by a couple of weeks. Instead, out they went! Plus, as not everyone is lucky enough to have the great job that I have, I was concerned that some individuals may not be able to get the time off if we didn’t let them know more specific details sooner rather than later.
Second, yes, I’m a giant nerd. So I went ahead and made Mr. Otter stop and take a photo of me with the sample invitation before we went in to the post office.
If you’ll first remember our invitation inspiration and the final product, you’ll remember these photos:
Why, yes, I did get out of my car and walk up to the drive-through mail drop off box at the post office for a Weddingbee photo op. We don’t have those fun, free-standing blue ones there! That’s how us small town folks do things, y’all.
That’s right! We officially invited people to our wedding! 210 completely handcrafted and assembled invitations made by myself (along with Mama Dillo, Li’l Dillo and Mr. A) were dropped off at the local post office yesterday afternoon. And after actively working on these suckers since we became engaged back in September of 2011, I was SO FRIGGIN’ HAPPY to get them off my hands. Dropping them off felt like turning in a freshly printed and stapled term paper to a professor after working on it all semester—I was super proud, super relieved, and super exhausted.
There they sit moments before their mass exodus to the USPS.
Although I’m ultimately happy with the way they turned out, my adventure in DIY invitations wasn’t without its hiccups, and I fully intend to share them with you after I do the big reveal! The honest truth is, DIYing invitations is a lot. of. work. I completely underestimated how much time and effort it really was going to take, and although it did save us a pretty decent chunk of cash, I totally and utterly understand why wedding stationery can be so expensive. Time is MONEY, y’all!
Anyway, even though I’m DYING to show you guys the finished product, I want to wait at least a week or two so our guests have a chance to see them first. But I’m not completely heartless, yo! How about a little sneaky peek of some of my favorite elements of the envelopes?
Anyway, I’m really hoping our guests appreciate all the time and effort we put into these invitations, and I absolutely could not have done them without the help of Mr. A, Mama Dillo and Li’l Dillo. I’m so grateful to have such wonderful and loving people in my life who are willing to sit down at the kitchen table and cut hundreds of sheets of cardstock with me. Now I just can’t wait to see those RSVPs start rolling in!
Did you choose to completely DIY your wedding invitations? In the end, was it worth it? Did you save any money by going the DIY route?
Hive, I never thought I would be that bride. That bride that cared about stamps. Especially the STD stamps! I just assumed that when people received our STD, they would note the date in their planner/phone/etc. and then toss the STD.
But then, there I was, standing at the post office to purchase postage and suddenly…everything seemed to be in slow motion. I watched as the employee pulled open the big binder of stamps. I watched her flip, flip, flip through the pages and start to pull out several pages. What did I see, you may be wondering? I saw these:
Personal photo, unfortunately
I saw ALOHA stamps staring back at me. And a variety of Hawaiian shirts. Now, if I were having a destination wedding? Sure, toss the ALOHA at me. But for our rustic, romantic, light and neutral colored wedding? No. These simply did not fit the bill.
If you remember, I was ever the picky bride when it came to choosing stamps for the Beanstalk save the dates! To me, stamps are the finishing touch. They set the tone for whatever treasure is hidden inside the envelope. (I know I probably sound a bit crazy going on about the importance of stamps, but when you design your whole wedding paper suite…stamps are a pretty big deal!) Well, when it came to the actual wedding invitation, I was just as picky as I was with the save the dates! Mr. Beanstalk and I had lusted over the look of vintage stamps since we first started really getting into the wedding-planning process. I knew going the vintage stamp route would be a bit expensive, but I still REALLY wanted them (they would complete the look we were going for with our invites!).
Well, back in July, I decided to take a mock-up of our invitation to the post office to have them weigh it, that way I would know how much postage we would need (and ultimately determine if vintage stamps were even possible). The woman weighed the envelope that contained our invitation and quoted me a price of 65 cents. I was floored! That seemed so inexpensive! I went home and researched vintage stamps and found some I liked that would go with our theme.
How perfect is this vintage stamp for our Florida destination wedding?!? / Image via Florida Memory
I went back to NYC J’s apartment a day after our stuffing extravaganza, this time with stamps in hand, to finish sealing and stamping all the envelopes. After some delicious Epicerie Boulud egg sandwiches (yum!), we got down to business. It took a while, but we got it done!
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All done!
Because I love the stamps we used, I wanted to showcase them all here.
For the domestic invitations, we went with a 65-cent stamp, as our invitations were just on the verge of being over one ounce in weight. I chose a butterfly rather than the wedding-cake stamp that the USPS currently advertises for weddings. It seemed fitting since Baltimore is likely where we’ll commence our honeymoon sail!
I didn’t care about stamps. I don’t care about stamps. But with my invitations, I all of a sudden cared. How did that happen?
The invitations weighed in at 85 cents for postage. I was slightly relieved that they cost more than 65 cents because I am not a fan of the dated wedding stamps offered by the USPS. They seriously remind me of my grandparents’ Golden Anniversary in 1993.
I didn’t care enough about stamps to not put Forever Liberty Bells on my invitations, but since I had the time to look and they fit our “budget,” I went shopping for a specific stamp. I remembered a stamp I saw on a couple of invitations, and was eager to use them. They are not Forever stamps, but two of them would equate to 88 cents, just three cents over the postage. What were these stamps?
Now that invitations are on my mind, I am also consumed with thoughts about stamps. (What is it about wedding planning that makes even the smallest, and typically unimportant, details so incredibly significant!?) Truth be told, I probably wouldn’t have even thought about stamps yet had they not been the cause of a potential-but-carefully-avoided-freak-out when sending our save the dates.
I mentioned previously which save the dates we chose, but just for kicks and giggles, I wanted to give you an idea of what the final product looked like. They are the Bold Stripe Save the Dates from Minted, and I was really pleased with how they turned out. We chose to go with the add-on option of putting a picture as well as a short paragraph on the back, and I’m really glad we did because I think it’s a nice, cheery surprise when you turn the card over!
For some reason I built up having our invitations hand cancelled and manually sorted as a big, scary thing. For one, I’ve heard some horror stories about post offices refusing to do it, or charging more money. Secondly, I wasn’t able to find a lot of information about the hand cancelling process in Canada (except for Miss Eagle’s post, which was a relief for me to read!).
Personal photo-another little spoiler! The white envelopes are for our photographer, and for the people who gave us their addresses AFTER I wrote out their envelopes with the wrong address. Whoops.
When we sent out our save the dates I used whatever permanent postage stamps Mr. Dragon managed to pick up, which happened to be ones featuring the Canadarm and other fun Canadian things. We didn’t really care that much about pretty stamps, to be honest.
I hadn’t really considered what to do for our wedding postage. There didn’t seem to be many options…
Franklin the Turtle stamps via Canada Post
Since our save the dates were postcards, our US postage was $0.29 (pre-January 2012 price increase). I spent lots of time stalking the USPS website for wedding-invitation stamp options, so I tried to check out our postcard-stamp options.
Or so I thought. It turns out there was exactly one design worth 29 cents.
{image via USPS}
Herbs. I was disappointed that I was not given a chance to choose, but the stamps are actually quite pretty. I’ve become so accustomed to having a choice for everything that not having a choice almost felt like I was being cheated out of something.
However, our international postcards are quite another story. An international postcard requires $0.98 postage. I’m very familiar with this one from my frequent visits to the US. It’s a picture of Grand Teton National Park with fog drifting through trees.
When it came time to mailing our save the dates, I did so in a few batches. First up: my parents and Sister Beanstalk. I wanted them to receive their cards first in order to give me any feedback (yes, I am that much of a perfectionist), and also I just wanted them to experience the joy of being the first to receive them! Sister Beanstalk got hers a day before my parents (weird because they all live in Miami) and posted on Facebook how much she loved them. (YAY! They were a success!)
She knew I was DIY’ing all of the paper goods, but still thought that I had taken them somewhere to have them printed. (Nope, it was all me…that’s just how good the Gocco and I are!) My parents got theirs the following day, and I had them open it while I listened on the phone. (I’m beyond close with all of my family and being thousands of miles away can be hard at times…especially when they receive their save the dates and I’m not there to witness their reactions upon first viewing the tangible card!)
A few days after mailing my parents’ and sister’s cards, I had to go back to the post office to buy more stamps. (It was hard to calculate the exact number of each I needed while I was there the first time around.) You see, the buying of the stamps was a little tricky. I had done my research beforehand. I knew what stamps I wanted and how much each one was. I was planning on my bulky envelopes costing around 80 cents to a dollar each to mail. After weighing my envelope, the woman at the post office told me they would be 65 cents each! That totally threw me for a loop. I had completely overestimated!
I told her I wanted the “Garden of Love” stamp (a beautiful collection of heart shaped plants, fruits and birds).
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Image via USPS
The Garden of Love stamps are forever stamps, which mean they take the face value of whatever the current value is (45 cents currently). So, I had my one stamp, I just needed another stamp to accompany it. The woman began to show me my options. She even showed me the traditional (and in my opinion cheesy) wedding stamps, which I would only need one of per envelope because they were worth 65 cents (thanks, but no thanks!).
Oh hey. So I was all ready to post a bit about our invites, how I spent obnoxious amounts of time on the envelopes alone, how I asked to have them hand canceled, be all helpful, and such.
And then I got this in the mail:
Yes, that is a stack of invites. No, I did not mail myself 7 invitations. Those are ones that were returned to us, with this stamped on the back of them:
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Any minute now someone will be opening their mailbox, (not their e-mail box either, their real live mail box) and they will see this:
Of course the stamps will be canceled and the address won’t be blurred out (I hope!).
In case you cannot tell, this is a super-secret-bees-only-sneak-peak at our invitations—full pictures and how-to coming soon!
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…or multiple stamps, as the case may be!
Let the invitation games begin! No, we are not getting married until May. Yes, we just sent out our save-the-dates. Yes, the wheels have already started turning about our DIY invitations. I have a plethora of inspirational design ideas to share with you, but let’s start with a jumping off point: my first invitation-related purchase!
Let me start by briefly explaining my shopping habits. I love online shopping. I also love a good deal (almost as much as Mr. Dalmatian does). Thus, flash sale websites are right up my alley. In case you couldn’t guess, I also love weddings. So when I heard about DressRush.com, a site with daily deals for brides (and others too), I was all over it.
Now, let me briefly explain what I envision for our invitations, and pretty much every other detail of our wedding:
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