Weddingbee Blog

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?

Read more…

I always knew we would end up with a pocketfold invite, but I guess I never considered that they would be significantly heavier than your average invitation and would require a lot more postage. The invitations Champ and I have received were usually delivered with two stamps, and I figured ours would be no different. Just to make sure, I decided to go to the post office to get them weighed (which I highly suggest you do if you’re unsure). The first post office I went to quoted me 76 cents per invitation—a hefty price tag, but one I was expecting. The second post office I went to told me that our invitations were too stiff for their machine and we would have to send them at the package rate of $1.51 per invitation. Um whaaaaa? At nearly twice the original quoted price, I took my chance at an eighty-cent stamp and mailed them out at the post office where I was quoted the lesser amount. Risky? Perhaps, but I saved a good chunk of change.

Here’s the stamp we chose. It’s really the only 80-cent stamp I could find, but I thought it actually fit our winter wedding perfectly!
Read more…

Our invites are officially sent. After some delay and procrastination, I finally stuck them in the mail box today. Not only did I use labels on our envelopes, I also used non-matching stamps. Ohhh the horror! I was hoping to be able to use these:

source

Read more…

Back in September, I showed you the design file for the awesome save the dates that Mr. Taffy’s brother designed for us. Today I would like to show you the final, printed product!

Remember how I was hunting for the perfect blue for our color palette and bridesmaid dresses? As a placeholder, we asked Mr. T’s brother to use a gray blue for our save the date design. By the time the gocco came out, we had switched to a color palette using both robin’s egg blue and a darker blue-green for our palette. Take a look at the finished product!

Don’t mind my sloppy name hacking in photoshop!
Read more…

After reading about how Miss Sweet Tea had her invitations mailed and postmarked from the city where she will be married, I was triggered to write a post about getting special postmarks on any piece of mail you send.

When I send out my Christmas cards every year, I go an extra step to add a special detail by getting them postmarked in a Christmas-themed city*. I’ve mailed my Christmas cards from North Pole, NY, Bethlehem, PA, and Santa, ID. No, I didn’t have to travel all over this great nation to have this done. I mailed my Christmas cards to the Postmaster of each of these cities, and the post office there did it for me.

Bethlehem, PA specialty postmark - Christmas 2006

Having a love-themed postmark on your wedding invitations would be a sweet, personal touch, and there are lots of U.S. cities with names that would make them a perfect fit.
Read more…

Warning: This story is somewhat embarrassing for me. Apparently as a bride, there are things we’re supposed to know, and I must’ve missed the memo. Please be nice…

Our save the dates were FINALLY completed, and I couldn’t get them to our guests soon enough. There’s something so exciting about the big send off! During my lunch hour, I walked to the post office proudly carrying our STDs in an Adidas shoe box. I get to the post office and there’s no line. Saweeeeet. I’d been a good little bee and researched how much the postage would be, and the logistics of sending them through the post office. After so many suggestions from previous bees, I knew I wanted to hand cancel the envelopes, but I guess I didn’t really think about what this meant. For those of you who don’t know what canceling is - aaahh, who am I fooling… I’m probably the only one.
Read more…

As of approximately 8:11 this morning, the invitations are in the mail. I’ve worked so long and hard on those things, I feel like I’ve given birth to them! I packed them up as carefully as possible last night and then handed them over this morning to a perfect stranger who is sure to mangle and otherwise attempt to destroy those beautiful little pieces of paper. I had lofty ideals about having them hand cancelled, but trying to get that done in the city of Chicago makes the phrase “uphill battle” an understatement. I had done my research; I knew that I could probably get them hand cancelled if I tried hard enough, but that in the end they’ll go through sorting machines anyway. So when I went in this morning armed with my beautiful boxes of correspondence, the conversation went something like this:

Me: Gooooood Morning!

(Nothing but an evil glance from Grumpy McGrumperson post office worker. I quickly decide that the cheeriness is going to get me nowhere, tone it down a notch)
Read more…

This post will be sort of a mish-mash of a couple of things I discovered while experimenting with and mailing our invitations. First, I present you with a photo of Future In Law Puff’s invitation, which is evidence as to why you may want to go to the trouble of hand canceling if you made custom stamps (and no, I don’t have any suggestions on hand cancelling–I didn’t end up doing it because it seemed like too much work):

I am more and more thankful that I stopped caring about the stamps.
Read more…

Martha Stewart Weddings

Darn you Martha Stewart and your impeccable use of vintage stamps! (Sorry, Martha!) Ok, first off let me say that I love vintage stamps, and I love the look of them on wedding invitations; however, I am trying to prioritize our wedding splurges. Already our splurges have been on location, food, my dress, and hiring a string trio for the ceremony (which I haven’t posted about yet). But, I am always in the mood for hunting for a good deal! So, I did a little vintage stamp investigation to see if I could possibly add one more splurge item.
Read more…

The new All Heart stamp came out from USPS yesterday!
Read more…

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:

Read more…

I was SO happy to mail my invitations and get them out of here I thought I was going to burst. We finished the invites about a month ago, but getting all of them assembled, numbered (I almost forgot to number the RSVP cards, even after lots of bee advice!), addressed and stamped took awhile!

My mom and my grandmother helped me to put the finishing touches on our envelopes. First, my grandmother carefully glued these liners into our envelopes:

We only used two different papers because we ran out of the first, but I ended up liking them both.

Read more…

I went to the post office yesterday to get one of my finished invitations weighed. I was happy to find out that it was well under 2 ounces weighing in at a featherlight 1.20 ounces. The friendly postal employee even tested its thickness and I am happy to report that it fit easily through the test slot, saving me from the lumpy-bumpy surcharge (I’m pretty sure that’s the technical USPS term).

Read more…

Many fellow bees have blogged about having stamp issues with their invitations. Some purchased stamps at one point, but because of an increase in rates, they purchased those annoying 0.01$ stamps. Luckily for us Canadians we no longer need to deal with $0.01 stamps because they’ve introduced permanent stamps, similar to the forever stamp issued last year in the US.

I was really excited about this news, especially being someone who rarely uses stamps. I went to the post office and purchased 2 rolls of 100 adhesive permanent stamps. The only disadvantage of these stamps I would say is the variety, but a pretty flower like the one shown is nice and wedding invitation worthy.
Read more…

Yes, these

are off in their hand-canceled glory.

A note about the hand-canceling, as I know that some people have different experiences with it than others.
Read more…