Creating A Custom Cover For A 100th Birthday...any Suggestions?

Dear Community,

My wife's grandmother Betty turns 100 years old June 14th of this year. I would like to commemorate the occasion with a philatelic momento. Could you please review my plans and offer suggestions?

- What envelopes should I buy? Size and paper type?
- I will place the soon to be released Flag Act of 1818 stamp on the cover because grandmother was born on that holiday
- I called my local post office and the ordering manager told me they will have 4,000 of them for sale on June 9th. I think I will be able to get some
- I purchased some OGnh Scott #486 one cent Washington coil stamps to also include to the immediate left of the Flag Act Stamp. This is because I wanted to have a stamp from 1918 that I could afford to buy mint
- grandmother lives in Prescott, AZ and I have called the Post office in the center of town to confirm they will be able to cancel and post mark the covers on June 14th as a walk out service without the need to put them through the mail.

What else would you do?

- Should I have grandmother sign her name or address on the front of the cover?
- what about a cachet? I'm a mediocre artist and there's not much time to have something printed by June 14th. Do people glue printed photos on covers as cachets?

Thank you so much for your advice. I will Post the finished product soon after I return from the party.

~Mike

As for an envelope size, I would suggest the size of envelope used for invitations. Sizes vary, but are generally larger than the #6 standard cover. Here's a link to Amazon showing some of the varieties available.

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_...+invitations

As to your question about a cachet, rather than paste on a photo, have you considered printing a photo image onto the envelope? I recently did a couple of hundred covers for the new US Airmail stamp printing the cachet onto the envelopes with my inkjet printer. It took a few "wasted" copies to figure out how to lay out the image on my screen to get it to print where I wanted to on the envelope, but after that it worked fine. If you have a paint/image program with the ability to create a "vignette" in a sepia tone that might go along with the occasion.

Basil

Have any of grandmother's baby or childhood photos?

I will be looking into photos for printing onto the envelope as a first step in production. Great ideas guys.

This is an awesome idea! So cool to celebrate this way! Keep us "posted".

You can get a birthday card sent from the President by going through the process here and saying it is for her 100th birthday: https://www.wikihow.com/Get-a-Birth...he-President

You can give her a gift of a US flag that was flown over the US Capitol building on her birthday by contacting the office of her US Representative or one of her two US Senators. You do have to pay for the cost of the flag and you can see the prices on the Senators' or Representative's website but the cost is not set up to make a profit. It will be mailed to her with a certificate authenticating it was flown over the US Capitol on that day. http://americanflagfoundation.org/w...tol-Rev..pdf Or to see what such a page on a Senator's website looks like, here is the one for Senator McCain of Arizona https://www.pay.gov/public/form/entry/101/ A 3x5 cotton flag flown over the Capitol on her birthday with a certificate of authenticity would cost $20.