Weddingbee Blog

Thanks to my maid of honor, who swooped in two days ago and came to the rescue, the program fans are now pretty much done! This was an incredibly time consuming process, so I suggest starting it way head of time if you plan on making these.

The finished product

These are the supplies you will need:

• Heavy-weight cardstock
• Color printer and lots of ink
• Scissors
• Crop-a-dile eyelet setter/hole punch
• 3/16 eyelets, the extra-long variety
• Ribbon (optional)

Supplies

The first step, after downloading the template from Aylee Bits, is to come up with some content for your programs. I knew that I wanted to do six panels, so I decided on the following:

1. Cover page
2. Wedding party part one
3. Wedding party part two
4. Ceremony outline
5. Explanation of handfastings
6. Dedication page

I spent a little while typing out what I wanted each panel to say in Word. It wasn’t formatted correctly, but it was good to just get the content down. I did a bit of quick internet research on handfastings in order to explain the concept to guests, most of whom have probably never seen a handfasting before.

I had planned on downloading some free fonts, uploading clip art, and putting the whole thing together in Word. Fortunately, one of my good friends (the same one who threw my Rock Band shower–she’s a keeper) has a copy of Photoshop and knows how to use it. She listened to my ideas and looked at my inspiration photos and helped me pick out some Photoshop brushes to use for the programs. She got down to the nitty gritty of getting the template into Photoshop while I trolled Dafont for the perfect font.

We perfected our design, and I messed around with Photoshop enough to figure out how to type text into it. Once I got the hang of it, the text was much easier to format than it is in Word. I’m definitely a fan of Photoshop now.

The printed programs, just waiting for some cutting action

After our design was complete, I used my Canon Pixma printer to print the programs onto heavy, cream-colored cardstock. This project calls for a fairly thick cardstock because people will be fanning themselves with these things. The next step was cutting, cutting, and more cutting. We watched the first season of Veronica Mars (probably for about the fifth or sixth time) in order to make the cutting less painful. Less mentally painful, that is. It was still physically painful. The tip of my middle finger has been numb for the last 72 hours from all the cutting!

The fruits of all our cutting

Once all the cutting was done, it was time to put the panels into stacks and connect them with the eyelets. I started off with a traditional eyelet setting tool and hole punch, each of which involved a cutting mat, a hammer, and lots of banging. It just wasn’t doing it for me, so I read some reviews and decided to invest in a Crop-a-dile. The Crop-a-dile is perfect for this type of eyelet setting where you are punching through 6 pieces of thick cardstock at a time. I highly recommend this tool. I also made the mistake of buying eyelets that were too short. There was just not enough metal stick out of the back to hold the last sheet of cardstock in place. After scouring the shelves of Hobby Lobby, we finally found some extra-long eyelets that were designed to be used on leather–they turned out to be perfect!

The cover page

One note of caution: if you press down too hard on the Crop-a-dile when setting the eyelets, the panels will be packed in too tightly. You have to make sure the eyelet is tight enough to hold the pages together, yet loose enough so that guests can spread the pages out into a fan. It takes a little playing around with the tools until you get the hang of it. My MOH, Deniz, was instrumental in figuring out how to use the Crop-a-dile and in finding the extra-long eyelets. I’m so glad she came into town at the right moment to help me finish this project!

Ribbons!

The last step is the ribbons. We simply cut out three different colors of thin, satin ribbon, threaded them through each eyelet, and tied them at the bottom, forming a loop large enough to fit around someone’s wrist. We chose colors that matched those on the programs: gray, green, and cream. The ribbon isn’t structurally necessary, but I think it added some softness and really tied everything together.

What was your most time-consuming DIY project?