"Hand Cancelling" for invitations ...

so question, can you do this for anything? Like when I send out baby annoucements/invites to the baptism can I ask for this?

Christine - you can do this for anything ... I think the only catch is that it is free for anything with $0.58 postage or more ... but there may be an extra fee if it is for $0.41 post items.

I know that there were some replies about the invitations being run through the machines for sorting ... so I asked the post office lady about this (she is SUPER-NICE ... we live in a small town) ...

She said that the hand-canceling is a nice touch because it gives you the red stamp (kind of old fashioned) as opposed to the black computer cancellation from the machine. The invitations going through the sorter don't get them dirty or cause problems because they are simply scanned and sorted - there is no ink involved --- so no smearing and the machine doesn't "squeeze" them because it doesn't need to print anything ON them ...

so --- that's the scoop from the source!

Interesting. Great idea if it works for all of you ladies doing the boxed invitations especially!!!

My invitations only needed one stamp each and I wasn't charged anything for the hand cancelling.

Funny story: My FMIL suggested that I ask for hand canceling when I went to drop off our STD a few months ago. We had gotten personalized stamps with our monogram and the envelopes were caligraphied, so when she said it would "it would make the envelope look nicer" I didn't argue. When I got to the post office, the line was really long so that woman who worked there handed me the stamper and told me to go crazy. So I am standing there with the stamper in my hand, not knowing how doing it by hand would make it "look nicer" when I suddenly decide that the purpose of of hand cancelling is to protect the stamp from getting covered by the cancelling (I know, I know). Anyway, so there I am, stamping 100 envelopes NEXT TO my beautiful stamps so as not to hide them! You should have seen the woman's face when I handed her the stack of invitations! She was like "um, miss, did you not know that you were suppose to 'stamp the stamp'? Now you either have to re-cancel everything or risk having them come back!" I felt like the biggest idiot...