What's wrong with this picture?

(or how we solved yet another problem with our save the dates!)



If you said that the card is bigger than the envelope - you win!   You win, and we lose.  This is strike two with our Save the Dates. But if I wasn't going to let a typo ruin them, I was also not going to let a few centimeters of extra postcard ruin them either.  ** Note to anyone who is ordering postcards and envelopes from two different sites, make sure the measurements for a "standard postcard" on the site you get your envelopes from match the measurements of your standard postcard you ordered from a postcard company**

As you can clearly see, the edges where the postcard runs over the envelope have no text on them!  So I decided to trim the sides, and just move on.  (I didn't care if the text on the back was trimmed, because it was wrong anyway, but unfortunately I had centered it perfectly so it didn't not get trimmed at all.)

I knew I had to use a straight edge paper cutter to cut these, but I also knew that even with those, you can end up cutting on an angle and making your paper look weirdly straight and angular at the same time.  (Our "mark your calendar" inserts had this problem.)  I have an old-school paper cutter at school, and since  Mr. Ly was away for the weekend, I decided to stay late and see if I could find a solution to our little problem.  Turns out, after a few tries of getting the measurements just so - it turned out even better than I could have hoped.  I actually ended up liking the trimmed version better than our original.

Once I figure out the proper measurements, I plotted out the angles where I would need to cut, and lined it with tape.

Please excuse the state my paper cutter is in, it's probably as old (if not older) than my library.  It is the best paper cutter we have in school though. 

With the measurements lined up like that, I just needed to put the postcard in between the red lines and cut away. Turns out trimming the postcards down to size was the simplest solution I have ever executed!

In less than an hour, this was the scene in my library:

and this was what happened when I put my envelope and postcard together again:

It really was that easy.

At first I didn't want to throw all this away - I thought I could repurpose them somehow:

But in the end, were recycled, and out of sight - out of mind.  I was just so relieved that I found a quick and easy (and free!!) solution to what could have been another expensive problem.

Before and After - I definitely like the smaller one better. +1 for me, for making a mistake! 

So who else messed up their Save the Dates not once, but twice?  Just me?