Dropping off those beautiful invites to the post office is not the end of it. Unfortunately there is another MAJOR step involved. You will need to ask them to hand cancel your invites.
What is hand canceling exactly?
Hand canceling is when a manual stamp is placed on your envelope to show that it was actually processed by the post office. The reason you want to go this route is to prevent any marking or tearing that can occur from the mechanical processing of the envelopes.
Chances are your local friendly post office personnel will not want to do this process your envelopes for you (even if they promise to do this chances are the minute you hit the door they will be headed for the machine). To avoid this possible poor treatment of your paper lovelies, ask for the stamp and hand cancel them yourselves.
There is an upside to custom photo stamps, since they already come with the barcode they avoid the machine all together and do not need to be hand canceled.
Tiffany from Gourmet Invitations showed a great snapshot of the difference between hand canceled and machine processed.
