Stinkerpants

Invitation Details…Stamps and Postcards

June 16, 2008 in Wedding (also on Weddingbee) • 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.

Loving the Programs!

June 12, 2008 in Miscellaneous Ramblings • Wedding (also on Weddingbee) • Ceremony • Cultural Stuff • DIY Projects • Drawings • Ramblings While Planning • Stationery

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

Hey!! Today is LOVING DAY!!!! Do you know what Loving Day is? Loving Day is the day we celebrate the legalization of interracial marriage! And what better day to share my programs with you, I ask?!

Now, some of you are probably thinking, “what do wedding programs have to do with interracial marriage?” Well, let me tell you:

First, we are interracial (we’re getting the most obvious one out of the way first, clearly). Second, our program is all about being interracial (or rather, intercultural) because that’s what our wedding is all about. And THIRD, we actually mention this at the end of our programs.

Before I begin, I must say that I have never paid attention to or even noticed programs at weddings, but I never doubted that we would have them. Half of our guests are Chinese and won’t understand the Jewish ceremony, and the other half of the guests will be Jewish and not understand the Chinese parts. We also have our friends, some of whom aren’t Jewish OR Chinese and won’t understand any of it. Thus, the programs.

First the pictures, then some words, shall we?

This here is my sewing machine, all ready to sew some programs. Unfortunately something went awry in the machine and I have to take it in for servicing before I can complete the pink stack and the blue stack…but the green ones are all done, which means I’m 1/3 of the way through. Why three colors? Because everything is colorful at this wedding, and we couldn’t choose just one color for the programs. They’re all the same inside, though.

Here is the design of the program:

I’m quite satisfied with it, but MAN were these a pain in the neck. Believe it or not, the programs were a bigger pain in the butt than the invitations. First off, there was a LOT of printing to be done. These are slightly smaller than half of a regular sheet of paper. Two pages could be printed on one sheet–and there are 13 pages in each program. Plus the front and back covers and the little tag thing. That is a LOT of paper to sew through. It is also a lot of printing and cutting. But mostly it is a lot of ARRANGING. Arranging things in the correct order was a crappy job. Mr. CP and I did it while watching a really, really bad movie. The whole experience was incredibly painful, I’m not going to lie. But it’s over, so we’ll move on.

Here’s an inside page:

Now, for content.

On Page 1, we have our wedding day timeline.

Page 2 is kind of a welcoming. It explains how we met and thanks everyone for being with us.

Page 3 explains the meaning of our ceremony site and the meaning of “our” song–My First, My Last, My Everything, by Barry White.

Page 4 explains the order of the ceremony and reminds people that there will be a group photo in the ampitheater after the ceremony.

Page 5 explains how much our cultures matter to us.

Page 6 summarizes the Chinese traditions.

Page 7 & 8 explain the Jewish traditions (there are more Jewish traditions than Chinese traditions because we’re having a Jewish ceremony).

Page 9 thanks our parents.

Page 10 thanks our officiant and explains how we know her and why she is special to us.

Page 11 is for the bridesmaids.

Page 12 is for the groomsmen.

Page 13 is our “Last but not least” page, in which we honor the memory of our family members who have passed away, thank my aunt and my mom for creating the chuppah, thank my uncle for reading the Seven Blessings, and thank our fuzzy children. At the bottom of this page, we also write:

“Less than fifty years ago, our inter-racial marriage would be illegal. Today we are not only proud to be marrying one another, but we are proud to be Californians, now that gay marriage is finally legal.”

Without fail, that last part makes me cry every single time.

Okay, so I know this all seems needlessly thorough, but trust me, it’s actually really perfect. Mr. Cream Puff gets bored easily by these things, and even HE said it was great and interesting. Which I took as the highest compliment, of course. ;)

At a later date, I will be going through all of the cultural aspects of our ceremony in separate posts. If you guys would like to see the actual wording of any of these other pages, let me know! I would be happy to share them with you, but I didn’t want to make an ultra-long post. :)

To end this, how about a little bit of trivia? In 1948, exactly 60 years ago, interracial marriage was legalized in California. But it wasn’t until1967 that interracial marriage became legal in the United States. The history behind the fight for interracial marriage is very similar to the fight for gay marriage. Unbelievably, very similar reasoning was given for the “immorality” of interracial marriage, and a constitutional amendment was proposed to prohibit it (unfortunately in the case of gay marriage, the amendments passed in many states). I find it absolutely fascinating that it’s been only 41 years since the Loving decision, yet history is already repeating itself. Hopefully in another 41 years (hopefully less), it will be just as strange a thought that gay marriage was once illegal. Here’s to Loving Day! And here’s to really long programs!

The Invitations

June 5, 2008 in Wedding (also on Weddingbee) • DIY Projects • Drawings • Stationery

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

Okay, so the invitations are out, and I’ve even received a few phone calls from people who wanted to tell me how much they liked them! How awesome! I can’t wait to get the RSVPs back. In the meantime, now that most people have received them (hopefully), I’m going to share them with you!

This is the whole package. I had a custom rubber stamp made with our return address on it at Berkeley Rubber Stamp and Engraving Company ($15). I then used a clear VersaMark stamp pad and clear embossing powder and embossed our address on the envelope flaps. The ribbon is silk, made from recycled parachutes. The one pictured here is blue, but originally all of the ribbons were a beautiful purple (sadly I ran out and had to get a different color!)

Here’s the letterpressed front! I am really happy about the quality of it. Although I had a bad experience with their customer service, I have to say, the quality from Mercurio Brothers is very good.

Here’s a close-up of us in letterpress!

Now, getting into the meat of things. The invitation is an accordion. The accordion itself was made using large sheets of pool-colored cover weight paper from Paper Source. The last panel is affixed to one A7 luxe cream flat cards, and the front part of the accordion is sandwiched between one A7 luxe cream flat card and the letterpressed front. I printed the panels out on luxe cream text weight paper, straight from my ink jet printer. I had the RSVP postcards printed at Prints Made Easy. If you’re going to have people write on the front of your postcards, they shouldn’t be glossy, and Vista Print only has the glossy option, which is why I didn’t use them. The quality from Prints Made Easy was great.

A close-up of the details panel. We had a lot of information to share with our guests, mostly regarding the trolley/transportation situation.

The tips panel–this is where I shared information about our block of rooms and website. I also reminded people who might not be familiar with San Francisco to pack a jacket, because it’s cold here in the summer!

Directions…pretty straightforward.

The RSVP postcard is affixed to the accordion using a removeable glue dot. I found those at Walgreens. I am slightly worried that people won’t pull of the sticky dot and the RSVPs will get lost in the mail, but (yikes!) we will see. Hopefully our guests will think about that.

This is my attempt to limit the write-in guests. We’ll see if it works! I have a place where I wrote in how many seats we reserved for them. I wrote in their names on the RSVP because we had no inner envelope.

The back of the RSVP postcard…I’m trying to collect the out-of-town info so that distributing the OOT bags will be easier. I also put a little place for people to leave us a note (I love notes! I hope we get good ones!). And, last but not least, I had it addressed to “the future Mr. and Ms. Olsher-Ng,” because we’re all modern and stuff. ;)

So that’s it!! This has by far been my favorite part of the planning process. So fun!

DIY Calligraphy and Stamp Disasters!

June 1, 2008 in Wedding (also on Weddingbee) • DIY Projects • Stationery

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

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:

Not all of my envelopes look like this, however. As some of you know, I like to be a Prepared Puff. I like to get things done as far ahead of time as possible, so as to reduce time-crunch induced stress. Thus, I have been addressing envelopes for a couple of months now. One of my earlier envelopes does not have the spaced-out zip code:

And one more…

How many of you have this issue? We have a couple that will be married in one month–after we send out our invitations, but before our wedding. So how does one address their envelope? I decided to address it to “the future Mr. and Mrs.”

As you may notice, I addressed this envelope to Mrs. Rachel and Mr. Nick Lastname. This was a decision I made long before I started addressing envelopes. I am totally opposed to the idea of the woman disappearing into her husband (ie, Mr. and Mrs. Nick Lastname), so this is what I came up with. Sometimes I put the woman’s name first, sometimes I put her name last. I totally don’t care how many etiquette rules I broke! 

Okay, now moving on to the Stamp Issues. Well, they’re actually Post Office Issues, not just stamp issues. In order to keep our postage at 59 cents, I have redesigned our invitations THREE TIMES. I know every regulation like the back of my hand, and the postage situation really stresses me out because every time I go to the post office, I am told something different. Now, onto my long-ass story.

Our post office makes me miserable. I dread going there. It always takes at least a half an hour to get through the line, and once you get to the front, you are either faced with Lady Who Hates Life or Guy Who Doesn’t Mail Anything The Right Way. Lucky for me, the past three times I have gotten Lady Who Hates Life, who clearly hates weddings and wants me to have to mail all of my invitations parcel post.

Last week I went in to have them weigh the final invitation with the letterpress. Lady Who Hates Life set my invitation on the scale. I see that it weighs just under two ounces (thus, 59 cents). She looks at me and says, “why did you write the zip code like that?” I replied, “It’s calligraphy, they write it like that.” She tells me that the machines will not be able to read the envelope with a zip code like that, and I can’t mail it. I know that she is full of it–every time I go in there, she tells me something different which would require me to re-do all of my invitations.

Inevitably I go to USPS.com and find out that she is wrong. However, I also know that she is wrong about the zip code because I just received an invitation written like that (and don’t worry, I already tested it and the envelope got to its destination just fine). So I again ask her how much it will cost to mail my envelope, and she says, “$1.59.” There is absolutely no way that this envelope needs to be mailed parcel post, which is the price she was quoting me (I could see it on the screen). I asked her why it needed to be mailed parcel post, and she said, “because it’s too thick.” I made her put it through their little plastic slot thing that determines how thick is too thick, and despite her trying to hold it every which way to keep it from falling directly through the slot, it fell straight through. I asked her again how much it would cost to mail it, and she reluctantly said, “59 cents.” Then she gave me a look of death.

Her look of death haunted me. I was nervous about mailing them. What if she somehow was right? So I decided to get a second opinion. While I was visiting my parents in Oregon, I went to their local mail depot (not actually a post office). The two people there spent 15 minutes deliberating and ended up telling me they would be 96 cents each. I totally knew that was wrong, because their explanation made no logical sense, but Momma Puff bought the $1 stamps anyway. We drove by a real post office on the way to our next destination, and I made Momma Puff stop. This time, we got a very well-informed, nice postal worker who explained exactly why my invitations would cost only 59 cents to mail. However, we had all of these $1 stamps, and for some reason she wouldn’t return them.

And that, my friends, is how I ended up with postage that looks like this:

It’s not pretty, it’s not custom, and it cost $35 more for all of our postage than it should have. But you know what? I’m over it. I’m too sick of stamps to try to return them to the post office and get the right amount, and I’m convinced no one notices stamps anyway.

The one thing that does still bother me (I have to admit it) is the fact that we went to three different post offices and got three different answers. I do not understand how something like this can be so subjective! Shouldn’t it be easier than this?!

I wish I had some sort of solution for you guys. My only suggestion would be this: go to as many postal employees as it takes until you get the answer you want to hear (provided you actually know the regulations and know that you’re right). 

Bar Menus and Signature Cocktails

May 21, 2008 in Wedding (also on Weddingbee) • DIY Projects • Drawings • Reception • Stationery

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

From the beginning, I’ve thought about making signature cocktails for our wedding. This is a pretty trendy thing right now, but for good reason: it’s fun and it saves money, because you can serve hard alcohol, but you don’t have to have an entire open bar.

I was first inspired by bar menus I found various knot bios. They all seemed to be variants of the same thing: “Something Old” (gin and tonic), “Something New” (crantini), “Something Borrowed” (something from the couple’s past), “Something Blue” (Electric Lemonade). I knew I wanted to do something different, so Mr. Cream Puff and I had a brainstorming session. We toyed around with giving them a San Francisco theme (“San Francisco Bay Breeze”), but in the end decided to name all of the drinks after our pets, who aren’t included in the wedding in any other way. Here is my completed bar menu, which is being printed as we speak through Vista Print as oversized postcards:

I am super excited about these. My parents both think they are cheesy and cutesy, but I totally don’t care, and neither does Mr. Cream Puff. We think they’re cute. So what if we’re a little bit obsessed with our kids? We can’t help it: they are wonderful.

As for how we decided on our signature cocktails? The three cocktails are the Lemon Drop, the Vodka Martini and the Appletini. Originally I wanted very brightly colored signature cocktails, to go with our colorful wedding. Then we started thinking about the cost of brightly colored drinks (which usually have added liqueurs to create the color) and decided to go a different direction. All three of these cocktails have a vodka base and very few added ingredients. This minimizes the amount of alcohol we have to buy and simplifies what the bartender has to do. If you’re searching for cocktail recipes, check out Web Tender and Cocktail Times. These websites both allow you to search by type of alcohol.

So we had three cocktails and five pets. What to do? Well, we knew we’d be serving Fat Tire, and somehow connecting that to Yorkey’s 20lb cat was a no-brainer. All that was left was little Elvis Purrsley. We thought about adding an alcoholic drink named for Elvis Presley, but then I realized it would be cuter to give him a kids’ drink. Thus, the Roy Rogers (which is basically the boy version of the Shirley Temple).

For those of you who don’t have pets or agree with my parents on this one, here are a couple of different menus I’ve found in various places:

This one (this is my favorite design), from knottie h.lo:

Here’s one from knottie k-haus:

And this one, from knottie pixelvixen: