Wedding Blog

I am such a procrastinator. I ended up making these programs the week of the wedding, and I really didn’t dedicate much effort to these. I just knew I had a bunch of teal scraps from our pocketfolds, and thought that I could pull off a layered program with this.

So, here is how they came out. I will explain my mistakes in this post, since these were not perfect, just in case someone would like to benefit from my mistakes.

Supply list:

• 1 pkg. 65 lb. ivory cardstock (found at Office Depot)
• Thicker cardstock paper (105 lb. or heavier) cut to 4″ x 9/9.5″
• Ribbon
• 1/4″ hole puncher (found at Michaels)
• bone folder

The first thing I did was set up my columns and paper layout in Microsoft Word. I made the layout in “landscape” with 2 columns to make the most out of the paper (printing two program pages to a page of cardstock). I made the margins to these measurements: Top/Bottom: 1.25″ and Left/Right: 1″.

Then, I typed out my information in the following order by page:

Wedding Cover Page
Wedding Ceremony – Order of Mass & Ministers of the Mass
Wedding Party – Members of Wedding Party and Family names
With Love – Thank yous to parents and guests along with Memorials

Our ceremony was a Catholic ceremony with mass. I used Catholic Wedding Help (great website for you Catholic brides, by the way!) as a guide for a program template with mass.

Here is where I went wrong. I test printed for spell checking, but not necessarily to see how it all lined up, unfortunately.

I manually ended my pages, because I’m not very Word proficient. I ended up stopping at these points.

• Cover Page – 5″
• Wedding Ceremony – 6″
• Wedding Party – 6 7/8″
• With Love – 7 3/8″

I tried to squeeze the “With Love” part in too much. I should have played more with margins, but I thought I was okay. I’m sure if I would have done even numbers with inch gaps, it would have been perfect. Although, I was not about to redo printing all of these, so I brought them to my faithful Kinko’s to have them cut to size for $8 total. (I love Kinko’s.)

I then scored the heavy cardstock using the bone folder 0.5 inches from the top of the cardstock and folded it down to make the holder for the program paper.

I then enlisted the help of Mr. BF. He painstakingly punched two holes in each program set. It takes a good bit of strength to punch through all that cardstock (including the 4 program pages). Then, I pulled ribbon through the holes (the thinner the better) and made a simple tie. I didn’t even bother with bows… HA!

And there you have it! Simple layered programs. I will say I received tons of compliments on these, despite them not lining up perfectly.

So, brides-to-be, my piece of advice? Don’t sweat the small stuff on your DIY projects. Chances are, people won’t really notice the mistakes, but rather, the effort!

Did you have a DIY project that didn’t go quite right but you used anyway for your big day?