You have no other option but to come
The invitations sat, “airing out”. Mom and Dad came over for dinner one night and I handed them their RSVP card to have them fill out what they wanted for dinner. They gave me their RSVP and I tossed it into the RSVP box. Two days later, for some reason, that RSVP flashed into my brain and it occurred to me that I didn’t remember Mom checking a “will attend” box. I went racing upstairs to the RSVP box to confirm my suspicions and it was true. We were so concerned with getting the food choices on the RSVP that we did not give the guests the choice to attend or not. UGH. Thank goodness that we ordered them early. I still had time to reorder, but not much.
I went onto the website again and reordered the RSVP cards. They said they could turn them in 5-10 business days. This put us mailing the invitations somewhere between 6-7 weeks before the wedding. Common etiquette tells you that you need to mail the invitations 6-8 weeks before, so we were cutting it close. The Indian site did get the cards into fed-ex very quickly and they sent me a fed ex link, so that I could track my shipment. It was scheduled to show up July 3rd. All was going fine until there was a storm in India. My shipment got delayed! Because of the July 4th holiday my shipment was not going to show up until the 5th. This meant that in order to get the invitations out with in 6 weeks of the wedding, we only had a couple of days to get them out. The troops mobilized. Mom and Dad came over for dinner (that Mom brought over, thanks Mom). We set up different jobs for each person. Mom put the invitations together and numbered the RSVP cards (see: Things I Learned), I put the numbers by the guests names in the master spreadsheet, Dad stuffed the envelopes and my fiance sealed them (I had already put stamps on them days earlier).
Things I Learned: Put little numbers on the back of your RSVP cards. Keep a list of which guest the numbers are assigned to. Then, if an RSVP card comes back without the guest’s name on it, you will know who that RSVP card was sent to.
”The envelope is not sealing”.
What? Yes indeed, according to my fiance the envelope had no glue on it. Hmm. That was interesting. Well, there were some gold seals included with the envelopes. Perhaps we were meant to use those. I thought it was a bit odd, but didn’t think much of it.
It wasn’t until a friend of mine called me after she got the invitation that I figured out what had happened.
“The invitations were beautiful” she said, “but I thought I should let you know, there was no glue on the RSVP envelope, so I just taped it”. No glue?! Then it occurred to me. There had been a box for “self stick envelopes” when I ordered the invitations. I checked “no”, thinking that it meant that the envelopes would have that strip of paper that you had to peel off to stick the flap down. I thought that would look a little tacky on the RSVPs, so I opted “No self stick”. Of course, I thought by opting “No” that was opting FOR normal glue stripped envelopes, but evidently not. I opted for NO glue. Oops!
My fiance’s solution? “Just tell everyone that tells you that their envelope didn’t have glue….’Really? It must have just been yours. Everyone else’s came back glued”.
Funny guy my fiance.
Invitations, Things I learned | Comment (0)Simple yet elegant
We ended up choosing invitations that were simple, but elegant. I lean a little more to the exotic, but my fiance leans more towards simple patterns. Thus, our invitations were born. It is a nice combination of simple and a little exotic. For those of you who received invitations, and find this hard to believe, you should see the runners up.
Once we chose the invitations, we had to order them. I have to say, this process is not for the weak. Ordering was pretty easy, go online, chose your card and all of the extras that come with it. Extra pages behind the invitation? Yes. Thank you notes? Yes, please. Address pre printed on the invitation envelopes? Yup. Hand calligraphy of names and addresses of guests or laser printed or none? Self stick envelopes or not? Menu cards? And the list goes on. You then need to send in the wording for the invitation, the RSVP and anything else you want in the invitation. This actually takes a little bit of work. Because the site was Indian, there weren’t as many examples of what typical American invitation wording was. My fiance and I searched the Internet for a while looking for proper wording and designing our cards. Then we had to figure out how to design an RSVP card that would allow us to let each guest list their dinner choice (we are having a sit down dinner). We needed to be able to provide the dinner choice of each guest to the event director by table, so it was important to get this information on the RSVP. Once we finally nailed it down, we sent the documents by email to India. Now here is the beauty of outsourcing… the next morning there was an email from the company with proofs for us. We changed a few words and the font and sent it back. The next morning the changes were made.
THINGS I LEARNED: Make sure you have multiple people proof your invitations, RSVP and guest list to try to catch all of the errors before you send them off to the printers for the final run. The company is not going to proof it for you, even for basic mistakes. Now, this could be one of the hazards using an outsourced invitation vendor to be sure. I don’t know what the American invitation companies are like.
The back and forth went on for a few more turns until we were done. We then ordered the invitations a month ahead of when they were supposed to be sent. They arrived a week later. I was thrilled, they were well ahead of when we needed them. Remember the smell I referred to in an earlier post? Well it was strong! We separated all of our invitations and envelopes and let them air out. I was very glad we had gotten them so far ahead of when we needed them. Little did I know, that I was going to need that time.
Invitations, Things I learned | Comment (0)postal Efficiency part 2
When I first got the invitations, I fully assembled one and took it to the local post office. Yes, for those of you who read the blog on the stamps… it would be THAT other post office. I handed the postal employee my fully loaded invitation and asked how much it would take to send. She weighed it and tacked on a “stiff envelope” charge of 17 cents and told me that it would be 75 cents. So I bought 75 cent stamps.
Fast forward. We got the correct RSVPs, created an assembly line to put together the invitations, and got the invites out the next day. Phew! A weight was lifted off of my shoulders. Two days later, the weight was back, and heavier than ever. There was a wedding invitation in our mailbox, which would be fine, except it was OURS with a big red stamp on it of a hand with a pointing finger that said “Insufficient Postage” with handwriting that said Large envelope price of 98 cents, 23 cents due.
NONONONONONO! I did everything right! I checked went to the post office ahead of time! I had visions of 80 invitations coming back. So much for the 6 weeks before the wedding… AAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGG!
So we went online to see what the definition of a large envelope was and sure enough, we qualified by 1/8 of an inch. My fiance kindly put “take invitation back to post office” on his honey-do wedding list, knowing that I might “go postal” on the postal employee.
He took it back to “that” post office where the employee put the envelope on their little guide. My fiance said that the line was designating envelope sizes was pretty thick (about an 1/8 of an inch, I would imagine) and that if you went by the inside of the line, our envelope was too big, but if you went by the outside of the line, we barely fit. The employee stood by the previous person’s decision of 75 cents. She tore off the bar code sticker placed on the envelope by the post office that sent it back, crossed out the big red hand and the other writing and plopped it back into the outgoing mail. She explained that the postal service was going through a big reclamation project in effort to get all of the lost revenue from people using incorrect postage. We just hit an over aggressive mail handler.
“Does the fact that the stamp has been postmarked stop it from going?”, asked my fiance.
“No”, she said, “It did not reach its destination, so it is fine.” Huh? I hadn’t heard that before. Perhaps she was one of the big revenue losers within the post office. We fully expected to see that thing back, as well as a few others.
I am happy to report while that invitation had to be the ugliest one that we sent, it did not come back, but an RSVP did. We did not have any other invitations sent back to us, thankfully.
Invitations | Comment (0)