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Since we only had to snail mail a couple of save the dates (the rest of them having been sent electronically), I wasn’t too worried about which stamps to use. I ended up going with the standard wedding band stamp. Truthfully there were very few choices for wedding stamps:
(USPS)
That got me to thinking about which stamp I need to buy for our invitations and RSVP cards (albeit, we have yet to design/purchase them!). Here are a couple ideas:
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Where do polar bears fit into the Hamster wedding? Well, other than a small but pivotal role in the proposal, nowhere. However, based on the crazy postage necessary for our invitations (they are friggin’ stiff and heavy), a polar bear would be making a very conspicuous appearance, like so:
You like? Yeah, me neither.
I have nothing against polar bears in particular (never had a poor encounter with one), but featuring one on our invitation envelopes wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. That’s when I turned to the custom stamp route - via Zazzle. Using our engagement photos from our shoot with Erica Lyn, I created two stamps:
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Some of the wedding sites I’ve seen have given me real postage stamps envy. A collection of vintage stamps sprinkling the envelope? What a great idea! But a quick search on eBay indicated to me that it takes more than a quick search to find beautiful old stamps.
(source: cardgirldiy.com)
I guess I can just keep my eye out for beautiful old stamps, but I suspect every other wedding blogger out there has already bought all of the non-canceled ones by now, so I’m moving on.
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This weekend Mr. Fro Yo and I went to the post office to send out our save the dates. I finally had an opportunity to go to the post office, and I waited diligently in line with my bag of save the dates. Screaming children ran around, but I kept a smile on my face because this was a huge step in inviting our guests, and I was so excited. Finally it was my turn. I got to the counter and happily started taking out our save the dates and informed the postal worker that I would like to have these hand canceled.
The postal worker did not have a smile on her face and flatly told me that they don’t hand cancel.
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I debated for quite a while before doing it. The time had come to mail my invitations. Should I skip over to the post office on my lunch break or wait until the weekend when there is no time limit? I was zig-zagging between hand-canceling my invitations and just handing them over.
I pulled up to the post office, 45 minutes left until I was supposed to be back at my desk, stuck a few quarters in the meter and made my way inside. My invitations were all stamped. I’d taken them to two post offices prior to make sure the postage pricing was correct. $1.39 sounded like too much the first time but indeed, it was the same at the second post office. I could’ve easily dumped them in the big blue bin on the sidewalk since they were stamped, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
Our invitations are officially out of our hands and out of my mind as of today! I lugged them all to work on the train and mailed them from the (oh-so-convenient!) post office in my building.
And, of course, who doesn’t need an entourage when sending their invites?! My co-worker Megan was kind enough to accompany me down there to snap a few shots of the big “ta-da” (please don’t mind that I rolled out of bed a tad late today and didn’t put on a drop of makeup, ugh).
Last night I sealed them all and packed them up for the journey on the train. Don’t they look nice? That damask pattern across the top of the envelopes is one of my favorite details.
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Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
So, we mailed out our 80 invitations this week. It was quite the relief, because pretty much every piece of those things was handcrafted by yours truly. This was by far my most ambitious wedding DIY project. I’ll post later with pictures of them and some tips on what I learned, but for now, I’ll give you some pictures that tell the story of our mailing saga.
We had quite the drama over what would be the correct postage for these puppies. I delegated to Mr. Star the arduous task of taking a finished invitation to the post office (which is ALWAYS crowded in New York, despite the fact that there are about 5 within a few blocks!) and getting it weighed to find out how much it would cost to mail them.
He went to one postal worker who told him it would be nearly $2 to mail each invitation, and while this seemed high to him, he didn’t know how much I was expecting to spend and went ahead and bought $160 worth of postage.
When he came home and told me what had happened, I freaked.
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Since brides are always looking for cute stamps for their invitations and save the dates, I thought I’d share an invitation I received the other day that had these adorable King and Queen of Hearts stamps on it.
I’ve been using these fun Simpsons stamps on all my correspondence lately, but I love these King and Queen of Heart stamps best for wedding themed correspondence.
Are you putting a ridiculous amount of thought into the little details like stamps? Don’t worry — we’ve all been there! 
Another invitation element I decided to focus on were our stamps. I was inspired by some of the great options available at Zazzle.
Here a few that I loved:
Let’s Talk about Love
I like the graffiti on the left and the flower power on the right.
My mom is coming into town this weekend to help me finish up the invitations, so I went out and purchased stamps this morning. I brought a mock-up of our invite to the post office and had them weight it, because I had an inkling our invites might weight more than 1 oz., which would require extra postage… and I was right. 
While I was there, I snatched up some of the forever stamps for our RSVP envelopes, since they will go up in price on Monday, and checked out the options for 2 oz. stamps after the price increase.
Every cloud has a silver lining, right? If our invitations didn’t weigh so much, I wouldn’t be able to use this super cute new ‘wedding’ stamp without feeling frivolous throwing extra money away on stamps.
Mmmm…cake…
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Ever notice how when you’re planning a wedding, every little thing seemingly unrelated to weddings becomes wedding related?
Take today for example. I went to Costco to buy stamps. Stamps are typically not the first thing you think of when planning a wedding. But when postage rates are going to increase on May 11, and one has 225 invites, 225 RSVP cards, and a whole bunch of thank you cards to mail in the next few months, somehow stamps become wedding related. Then there is the whole issue of the look of the stamp, and debating whether or not it’s worth saving the extra couple cents and getting the Forever stamps. These stamps, of course, won’t look that great on the envelopes that house the invitations you’ve been slaving over. So, should you suck it up and pay more for stamps that match the aesthetic of your invites? I chose saving the pennies, because they started to add up to dollars when purchasing 700 stamps. Fourteen dollars, to be exact.
I can appreciate how some brides-to-be work hard to find cute vintage and recently retired themed stamps for mailing their save-the-dates and invitations. And I know sometimes the Postal Service sells stamps that go along with the theme of the wedding, making them a perfect fit for the invitation envelopes. I also think Zazzle stamps are so cute, and if they weren’t so expensive, I’d use them in a heartbeat.
In my case, I didn’t get too picky about the stamps and news from the Post Office weighed heavily in my decision to purchase one of the postage options I used.
With a RSVP reply date closely coinciding with the postage rate increase on May 11th, I figured it would just be easier on me and our guests if I used the Forever stamps for our response envelopes.
We got up early, on a mission, to get to the post office to mail our invitation parcels. This required us to actually get in our car (which we rarely do) to drive out to suburban Virginia. We went to the main processing facility in Merrifield, where the service is always great and everyone is… well… merry!
On a very serious mission
***This is NOT a test of the emergency Bee-roadcast System. This is for real.***
According this article, the price of stamps will go up by two cents in May.
The U.S. Postal Service announced Tuesday that the price of a first-class stamp will rise to 44 cents on May 11.
That gives plenty of time to stock up on Forever Stamps, which will continue to sell at the current 42-cent rate until the increase occurs. They will remain valid in the future regardless of rate hikes.
While the new 44-cent rate covers the first ounce of first-class mail, the price for each additional ounce will remain unchanged at 17-cents.
I’m thinking that two cents won’t break anybody’s budget, but forgetting and having all of your bee-oo-tiful invites returned for insufficient postage would be… ugg, horrible. So do take note!
***This concludes this Bee-roadcast System message.***
Later this week, I’ll be posting photos of our invitations. But first I thought I’d start by posting about all the things we forgot to think about when creating our invitations. May our foibles bring your laughter or wisdom… or both.
Mistake #1: Don’t forget to ask someone to help proofread your text… especially if you can’t read the language that the text is in. In law school, I served as what was basically a glorified copy editor for my law journal, and as an English Ph.D. student, I teach writing for a living. So when it came to the text of our invitations, I was feeling pretty confident. Silly Hot Cocoa.
We had a tri-fold invitation with a Hebrew panel, an English panel, and a Chinese panel, and I’m only literate in English. Yeah, you can see where this is going.
We had a company that specializes in Jewish wedding invitations throw together the Hebrew text for us, and for some reason I got so delighted with the aesthetics of the Hebrew that I completely neglected to proofread it. Thank goodness at the eleventh hour I recovered enough sense to ask one of our groomsmen who knows Hebrew to look over the text for us, because I got this delightful email from him: “Your guests who know neither English or Chinese might wind up a bit confused, as your wedding hotel is identified both as being in Tucson, AZ, and Marina del BEY, CA.” D’oh.
And all that confidence I had about the English text?
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