Weddingbee Blog

I need to start by apologizing for my disappearance. After getting over the flu, Mama Cloud flew in for a long weekend of appointments, running around, and turning my apartment into a hot mess of wedding craftiness. In the end we made a MAJOR dent into the never ending to-do list. I have lots and lots to share (and of course, never enough time to sit down and actually write about it) but I am so excited to share my favorite project to date: the programs!

I’m being incredibly unoriginal here. If you’ve been stalking Weddingbee (and the archives) for as long as I have you have probably stumbled over the beautiful programs by Mrs. Tiramisu, Mrs. Eggplant, and Mrs. Emerald. I saw the big ribbon on Tiramisu’s and was immediately interested. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to put that much work into the whole thing, until a friend who was married a few years ago in the same cathedral warned me of their program requirements. I’ve talked about them before, and they are no joke. None of it was going to fit on a single page and make my life easy either. I tried to come up with an original plan of my own, I really did, but I just kept going back to being a copycat. Imitation is the best form of flattery, after all!

So we printed, Goccoed, cut, scored, assembled, and tied until our fingers were numb, and I could not be more pleased with the result! All the paper is from PaperSource, and we ordered ribbon in bulk for this and a few other projects from Paper Mart. Black coverstock Goccoed with white ink made for what I thought would be an easy cover. Not so much, as it turns out white Gocco ink hates me. Luckily that was the hardest part of the whole project, and with a little extra force on my presses, it’s not a crisp white print, but it has a vintage-y look to it. Yeah, our wedding has no vintage vibe going on, but I’ve decided to move past that and love them anyway!

Mama Clouds fingers are probably still bleeding from these bad boys, but the bow just really makes the whole thing!

(The blurring makes me so sad)

I wanted to do a vellum page first, but time was not on my side, meaning I forgot to order the vellum and wanted to get them done, so it got skipped, and it’s just our silly mugs up first.

(The photo is courtesy of our photographer Heather, from Dolphin Dance Photography. I love it, and you can’t even tell we were sweating like pigs on a 100 degree day!)

Next is the wedding party. I really wanted to include everyone who would be involved in the ceremony so I tried to fit in as many as I could. And when I printed the pages, I hadn’t even asked two of our three readers. Luckily when I did ask them yesterday, they said yes!

(Please ignore the pathetic picture quality here. My battery was dying and the wedding bomb in my living room has eaten the charger…)

The next few pages were all the required information from the cathedral. It’s the whole mass and ceremony laid out in black and white. When I showed Mr. Cloud the first copy, he decided that made the whole thing more real. I guess the ring, invitations, and million other wedding things we have done weren’t enough!

One more page for the ceremony, and then the page that is the most special to us—a list of the loved ones we wish were still with us to celebrate. It includes grandparents, aunts, uncles, and one of my sorority sisters; all people we know would have enjoyed our day as much as we will! I searched everywhere for the perfect wording online and finally came up with this:

“For those loved ones who could not be with us today, we cherish your memory, and know that you are smiling down on this blessed event.”

We did a thank you to everyone for all of their love and support, and a page about the reception and information about transportation on the last set of pages. I figure if they are like me and never remember the invitation so they don’t know where to go next, this will be helpful.

Absolutely last was a quote from one of my favorite poems, I Carry Your Heart by E.E. Cummings. I first read this poem in college shortly after Mr. Cloud and I had become serious, but were still doing the long distance thing. It seemed so fitting at the time and is still true now. We even tried to have “I carry your heart” and “I carry it in my heart” engraved in our wedding bands, but my freakishly skinny fingers messed that plan up. I was very happy to get at least part of the poem in somewhere!

Twelve pages later and our labor of love was complete! I always want to know how many people make, so in case you are curious, we did 132 and are expecting a little under 200 guests. It’s a random number, I know, but I messed up the trimming on 8 pages and didn’t have complete sets… whoops!

What did you do for programs, if any? Are your copycatting like me, or being original?