Weddingbee Blog

I’ve been DYING to share these with you for the longest time! Here are our perdy programs…

We made them in two colors, to match our color scheme of spring green and pink! And the best part of the programs were that they were much easier to make, relative to our invitations. Again, these were designed in MS Powerpoint.

Here’s a better look at the front:

The floral patterns were on the vellum, so when you lifted it up, it was just the text…

And here is the back!

So here’s the how-to! What you’ll need:

• Pastel pink and green vellum paper in 8.5″x11″
• Ivory organza ribbon
• Luxe glass text heavy or cover paper
• Lime green laid texture paper (warning: it is slightly see-through when it comes to using ink jet printers…it still worked out beautifully, but if I had more time between making our programs and the wedding, I probably would’ve returned this and purchased linen paper)
• Fiskars rectangular single hole punch (I bought mine at Target, but this is where I found one online from googling)

Step 1. Set up your design templates! I had bought a lot of luxe glass paper from Paper Source for our invitations in order to get the discount, so I wanted to maximize the leftover paper. I decided the best way to do this was to fit three sheets on a page, like so:

I first made sure the slide was the right size using “Page Setup” –> “Slides Sized For:” –> and then selecting “Letter”. Then I created a box by selecting a rectangle from the “Draw” toolbar, right clicking and going to “Format Autoshape”. You can adjust it to the exact dimensions you want by going to the “Size” tab and manually adjusting the height and width. I made the outline again very light dotted lines, as these were just for my own guidance and I didn’t want it to print out visibly.

Step 2. Design the cover the way you would want it to look with the vellum on top. This way, you can get all of your spacing done correctly. Add in the images and text that you want. We wanted our programs to be reminiscent of the invitations, so we used a portion of the same graphic and all the same fonts (Lainie Day and High Tower Text). Take a look at the initial design:

Once you have that all set up and designed the way you want, copy the entire slide and create a new slide. You can do this in “Normal View” under Powerpoint, by going to the slide sorter toolbar on the left, clicking on the slide, and then hitting “CTRL-C”, placing your mouse cursor below that slide, and then hitting “CTRL-V”. Then just delete the parts you don’t want on each layer!

For the vellum, we deleted all of the text:

And deleted the graphics for the cover that would be printed on the Luxe paper:

Step 3. Design the pages that will be inside of the program.

The pages we included were as follows:

• Order of Ceremony
• Scripture readings
• Lyrics to the congregational hymn
• List of our our wedding party and helpers
• Our thank-yous
• And on the back cover, our new contact info

Keep in mind that your guests will be flipping the pages vertically, so you want to make sure your margins are correct. What this means is visualizing where the ribbon will bind everything together and making sure you have enough space for that. So for some pages, we had a big margin at the top, like so:

Whereas on other pages, the margins were at the bottom of the paper:

Step 4. Print and cut! Note that the inner pages will all be double-sided, so make sure you know how to feed your paper in properly so that the orientation on both sides is correct. You should be seeing the text upright when you flip the paper vertically.

And because the dimensions of the programs are pretty simple, I recommend getting the whole stack cut at Kinko’s…it will save you many precious hours!

Step 5. Assemble and punch! Gather all of the pages together in the right order. Using the rectangular hole punch, make two punches about 0.5″ from the top, and 1″ apart from each other.

Step 6. Tie a pretty bow. Thread the organza ribbon through the two holes, starting from the front to the back and then back to the front again. Tie a pretty bow…

And you’re done!