Dear Brides, all y’all, current, and future,
Hear me when I say, there will be losing battles, and that’s OK. For instance, we put a lot of energy into making sure our DIY invitations didn’t look cheap or tacky so to top things off we splurged on nice stamps. You know, the ones with the pretty roses? As it turns out, you need to stamp the return envelopes too as a courtesy to your guests (duh). Our first mistake was that we only bought enough postage for the main envelopes. Oops. May you learn from our mistakes!
What we hoped for. (Oh So Beautiful Paper)
The mini return envelopes were the first part of the invitations to be finished, so naturally I started stamping them with the pretty rose stamps. About halfway through I realized we wouldn’t have any stamps left for the main envelopes, so off we went to the post office to get more. On that particular day, all they had were sunburst stamps, so we snagged some of those instead. Not ideal, but sunbursts are nice too. We finally finished the invitations about a week later and brought them to the post office. A good wedding hack to remember is never just drop your invitations into the mailbox. Always take them directly to the post office and have them weighed. I knew someone who put all of their invitations in the mail and it turned out they didn’t have enough postage so the invitations got sent back and a few went missing. Save yourself the headache by having the post office officially weigh them.
Our second mistake was not buying forever stamps. Again, may you learn from our mistakes. A week or so had passed and it just so happened that the national stamp price increased to 49 cents and we had stamped everything with 46 cents stamps. Shockingly, the United States Post Office would not just comp us 3 cents an invite. Shucks.
Turns out the only 3 cent stamp they had was an ugly red one with a silver coffee pot on it. And just like that we went from pretty roses and wedding sunbursts, to coffee pots. COFFEE POTS!
This is what we ended up with.
Full confession? I thought, “So what?” No one ever said, “Remember the stamps on those wedding invitations? Those ugly things ruined the whole event for me.” Trust me, no one will remember the stamps. So yeah, our guests received great invitations with really ugly looking stamps (sorry guest!). And that’s how this wedding planning thing goes—there will be mistakes, hiccups, and detours but if at the end of the day you end up married to your best friend, ya done good kid. Ugly stamps be damned.