Getting Formal

My dining room has been invitation headquarters for a few days. The long oak table serves as a desk for a couple of laptops – my HP Pavilion , Em's  Mac – and a printer that came free with the HP a few years ago. An assembly line of the envelope inserts spreads across the surface too: invite, info card and reply postcard. The postcard will require its own stamp before stuffing.

I’ve taken on a variety of new roles during wedding planning. Last week I found myself punching out tiny flowers to decorate wedding favors. Paper crafting is new to me.  Proof that you can teach an old quilter new tricks. Seems what my generation did with cloth this generation is doing with card stock. (Totally random observation there.)

This week Em and I are printers, producing envelopes that give the official wedding invitations a classy look our handwritten addressing would lack. Easier said than done, but worth it in the end. Trouble was, the envelope size did not jive with Microsoft Word  choices, but  a click on Options. . . gave us some wiggle room on  return address margins - one-inch top, .7inch left. That could be saved as default. For some reason, the five-space  differentiation for a centered delivery address has to be manually set for each envelope.  More-miscalculations-than-I-would-like-to-admit later, we had our format and a pleasing font - .Andalus italics. Bold italics was a tad too heavy.

There’s actually been an evolution to this envelope-by-envelope print-out plan, all  phases steering clear of  handwriting. In March, the save-the-date reminders were mail-merged onto clear labels that gave  a nice, uniform look to the postal harbingers, but not nice enough for the Big Day invite.  I practiced printing one after the other addresses on the shower invites a few weeks ago, but the envelope size matched one of Word’s choices – so that was a cinch. This week, with the give and take Word allows, and the give and take of a Bride-to-Be and a Mommy-of-the-Bride, we are on our way to feeding those odd-sized envelopes through the HP Pavillion, but not before a trip to the Post Office for stamps . . .