Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

Today I bought stamps for our wedding invitations. This means that I'm finally ready to put them together.

Buying stamps might not seem like a great achievement, and I suppose it isn't, but it took us a long time to get to this point.

We should have the invitations in the mail this week or next, which according to my schedule is right on time.

As soon as we decided on a retrofuturistic theme, I started looking around for invitations that might be appropriate. This wouldn't have been difficult if we had an unlimited budget, as there are tons of retro invitations out there I would have loved to use. Unfortunately, most of them exceeded our budget.

Finally, I found Fabulous Stationery, a Philadelphia graphic design firm that offers a wide variety of retro themed note cards. We ordered a sample of the designs we liked and were pleased with the results. We especially liked a simple, clean design with an aqua background, orange, pink and red concentric circles, and a thin elliptical white line. This was great because it was close to our wedding colors, and we're also using a circle as a motif. The design is even called "orbit", which fits our space-age theme.

As an added bonus, they even told me that I could pick the invitations up at their office and save shipping and handling.

Although we found them early, we didn't actually order our invitations until a couple months ago, and I had to make several back and forth calls to make certain that we could personalize it the way we wanted. They were very accommodating, which was a relief, because I'd really had my heart set on their cards. I picked them up in May.

Since then, we've been putting together the rest of the materials that need to be included. We had to buy some large outer envelopes in which to put everything, which we picked up at a stationery store at a local mall.

Then we had to wait for our event coordinator to send us a card with hotel rates on it, which took longer than I expected, possibly because she was busy trying to finalize a number of things before taking her maternity leave. I was happy to discover that the cards include directions, so we don't need to print those separately.

Once those cards had arrived, we had to decide what we were going to do about reception cards. Our space inside the invitations had been limited, so we couldn't include a line that said "Cocktails and reception immediately following the ceremony." We felt it was important to include that, however, so this week I bought some printable Avery postcards. The Gryphon printed those up for me, and they look great. He even tried to match the font of the invitations.

The Gryphon is a font master. He did the labels for us, as well, choosing some really cool, futuristic fonts. The one on the exterior envelopes is designed to be more readable, while the interior one is more artistic. To print them, he used a Microsoft Excel document I'd put together, including all the guest names and addresses.

This morning I stopped at the post office and bought the stamps, taking with me one sample invitation with everything in it. The postal clerk looked at the reply card and said it would be 41 cents. This confused me at first, because I'd forgotten the price had gone up. "But it's standard size," I said.

"Yes, I know."

When my brain caught up, I assured him that 41 cents was fine. "I forgot the price went up. It seems like it happened a couple times this year."

"It's actually been a year since it increased last," he corrected me. I gather they're a little sensitive about the rate changes at the post office. They must hear complaints a lot.

For the interior stamps, he gave me some flowery violet hearts, which is what they typically use for wedding invitations. He apologized for having to give me a sheet of regular 58-cent stamps for the 58-cent exterior envelopes. Usually, he explained, they have coordinating 58-centers for wedding invitations, but they haven't arrived yet.

I told him that the Margaret Chase Smith stamps are fine. She's from the Distinguished Americans series, and apparently was a former senator and the first woman to have her name placed in nomination for the U.S. presidency at a major party's convention (1964 Republican Convention). Cool!

So now it's just a matter of putting everything together, which we can do this weekend. We'll put them in the mail on the first sunny day that follows (since I've been advised not to put them in the mail on a rainy day, when they could be exposed to water in the handling process).

One more step closer to our wedding! Woo-hoo!

More on Alyce's wedding planning:

Musings on Alyce's Wedding

Copyright 2006 by Alyce Wilson

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