Stinkerpants

Invitation Details…Stamps and Postcards

June 16, 2008 in Our Wedding • My Tips • Stationery

 This post was originally featured on Weddingbee.  To see all of the comments, you'll have to check them out over there!

This post will be sort of a mish-mash of a couple of things I discovered while experimenting with and mailing my invitations. First, I present you with a photo of future in-law’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 canceling–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.

Secondly, we have the RSVP postcards. I sent my mom our Save the Date postcard, just so she could see what it looked like, and to make sure it got there okay. When I saw it after she’d received it, I was horrified. It was totally scraped up! Unfortunately, I’d already printed my RSVP postcards. I decided to send a couple to her and to myself, just to see how they ended up. They arrived in much better condition, but still pretty scraped up from the machines:

I still decided to send them, though, for several reasons:
1) Well, I already made them.
2) When our guests see them, they will be perfect. I’m the only one who sees them messed up.
3) The part that is messed up doesn’t affect any of the information I need to gather (meal choices, names, etc).
4) I plan to keep the cards and put them in the back of our guestbook. The notes are the parts I wanted to save, and that part isn’t messed up.

One thing to note is that I got the RSVP postcards done through Prints Made Easy. My Save the Dates, on the other hand, were printed through Vista Print. I’m sorry to say that they didn’t fare as well as the Prints Made Easy postcards, because the finish is different. The front was badly mangled…so long story short, avoid sending Vista Print postcards if you want them to look perfect.

Overall, my opinion is this: RSVP postcards are okay. If you’re sending out 100 invitations, it will only be $15 more to send them in envelopes, so if you’re thinking about using postcards just to save on postage, it’s really not that much of a difference. A good reason to send postcards, however, is because you like the way that they look, or they fit into your invitation design better. Postcard Save the Dates, on the other hand, are not a good idea (in my opinion). As cute as the idea is, I just don’t think it works well in practice–people might not notice them, whereas everyone feels special to get a fun envelope in the mail.