Weddingbee Blog

I’ve figured this out about myself. I’m a procrastinator. Even worse, I’ve convinced myself that I work better under pressure and therefore can justify procrastinating. This is probably completely false, but I like to try to believe it anyway. Anyway, this post wasn’t supposed to be about procrastinating, but instead about one of the projects that I procrastinated on doing - our wedding programs.

I had these lofty ambitious goals to do fan programs like Mrs. Bellpepper and Mrs. Plum but since we didn’t get our act in gear to actually figure out the whole program (music, who reads what, etc.), the project was delayed. By the time we had everything in place, I thought it best to save my sanity and not have to worry about all that cutting! Instead I came up with a far simpler easier program:

Front Cover

I bought linen cardstock in Blazer Blue from paperandmore.com, and had them cut the sheets in half for me (8.5″x5.5″) - it saved an extra step for me! I then brought out the gocco and used gold ink to put our monogram on the front.

Inside Cover

For the inside, I designed the program using Microsoft Publisher. I modified the 8-page booklet template a little. Since the programs are pretty small (each page is 4.25″x5.5″), I put two programs one template page (so, on page 1, you would see two page 1s on top of each other). This way, each complete program took up only 1 sheet of cardstock (double-sided). Then, I just printed them out on our home printer (thank goodness we have separate cartridges for blue and pink ink!) on lightweight ivory cardstock.

After all the programs were printed out, I followed the advice of Mrs. Daffodil, and took our programs to get cut at Staples (Kinkos is slightly cheaper per cut, but Staples was more convenient for us to get to)! We asked for 3 cuts. Because our programs consist of multiple folded sheets, we had the paper also trimmed on the two edges so that they wouldn’t stick out beyond the edge of the blue cover paper. And then, of course, we had the one cut down the middle two separate the two programs I stacked on top of each other. Daffodil was right, this indeed is money well spent. Instead of hours of cutting and trimming, I got a nice clean cut in a matter of minutes!

Next, it was time to assemble. While I thought of tying them together with nice pretty ribbon, in the end, I opted for the quicker cleaner route - stapling. And this bad boy was up to the task:

Swingline Heavy Duty 12″ Long Reach Stapler

With a little assembly line help from my family (one puts the three sheets together, one lines up the paper and one pushes the staple in), the programs were done in no time!

Our little programs all in a row.

While they are definitely less “showy” from what I originally planned, I think they came out alright, they get the job done, and I’ve managed to keep (at least some of) my sanity.

Have you toned down or eliminated some of your DIY projects because you either ran out of time or because they just got too complicated?