Weddingbee Blog

Back to programs. So we were going for Mrs. Cupcake, with a round twist.

With a general shape and size in mind, I got to work “designing” our programs. Let’s talk words first. Believe it or not, I actually couldn’t decide what to have on the cover. Here are two popular options:

• “The marriage celebration of…”
• “The wedding ceremony uniting…”

I couldn’t decide, so I mushed them together. Our programs read: “The marriage celebration uniting Deanna & Daniel.”

Now, lets make it pretty.

Step 1: Open PowerPoint (Cheeseburger Style, I told you), and change your slide size to 11 x 8.5″- Landscape.

Step 2: Draw a circle. Since our circle cards measured 5.5″ in diameter, I made mine 5.25″ and changed the color to a light grey.

Step 3: Add Text! I did each line in a different text box, so that I could squeeze them together vertically. Not surprisingly (if you read my last post), I chose peach sundress as the cover font (except for the ampersand, which is Little Lord Fontleroy).

Step 4: Flourishes! So, this was the hardest part. Because I have NO design experience, skills, or programs, and I couldn’t find the exact shapes I was picturing in my mind on iStockPhoto, I had to go a kind of roundabout way to get my flourishes. First, I found this sweet graphic in Microsoft Office Clip Art. Then, I opened it in Paint (oh I know you’re cringing now!), blew it up to 400%, and started dissecting away!

I specifically wanted the parts in the red and green boxes. After I had dissected each part away from the rest of the design (using the handy eraser tool, pixel by pixel), I reduced the size down to 100% again, and I had my individual flourish pieces! Note: I had to do this 2 separate times, since the two pieces I wanted intersected each other.

Alright, so you’ve got your two pieces, now insert them into your PowerPoint and manipulate them until you get them into the size and position you want:

Step 5: Dot Stitching. So, I love the look of stitching - on paper, on cakes, on everything - and I knew I wanted to include it in our program cover. For this, you will need to turn on the grid (under the View Tab > Grids and Guides). I drew lines connecting the corners on the grid. Once you’ve got one line, you just copy and paste it then move it until it is parallel to the other line. Then repeat this same thing for the perpendicular lines.

Looks ugly, right? Well now you’ve just got to back up the lines that are occupying the middle of your cover, like so:

After you’re all done, you will be left with this:

See how the dots hang over the edge of the circle? Don’t worry, we’ll take care of that.

Step 6: Group everything together (Edit > Select All > right click > Grouping > Group) and then copy and paste so that you’ve got two covers on one page:

After my previous program post when I mentioned that I wasn’t planning to use a Gocco or Yudu to print these bad boys, reader LittlestBirds pointed out that I hadn’t explained how I planned to print on my circle cards! She was right, I left it out intentionally. You see, originally, I thought I would just print directly onto the cards with my trusty printer. Alas, the circle cards are too big for the envelope slot and too small to go through the feeder. That’s when I knew I would have to print on another sheet of paper and then attach it to the circle cards.

Luckily, I have a ton of paper in our wedding colors laying around just waiting to be used. Here are the printed covers on Stardream Metallic Paper in Kunzite from Papers-Papers.

You can kind of see the sparkle here:

And that’s it for the program covers! For now, at least. The next installment will be program assembly (shudder).

Alright, with that done, I had to take care of the words inside the program that, you know, make up the actual program.

I used Microsoft Publisher to create an 11 x 17 landscape document. As Mrs. Cupcake mentioned in her program post, when you’re making an accordion program, you have to keep the number of columns even so that the folds line up correctly. While the Cupcake’s programs had six columns, I decided to keep ours at four, 4″ columns per program. So, the 11 x 17 document had 2 rows of 4″ wide by 5″ tall text boxes lined up next to one another, like so:

I decided to list our parents and the bridal party in the first column, the ceremony order in the middle two columns (just followed along from our ceremony planning guide provided by the Catholic church), and finally list our grandparents, deceased relatives, and some thank yous in the final column. Lastly, I put in some light grey guidelines into the document to help with cutting and folding:

After a quick trip to Kinko’s (where I was yet again underwhelmed with their print quality… but where else can I print these things?!), I had my program innards printed and laser cut:

And that, my friends, is how I “designed” our programs! The final installment is up next: assembly!

Anyone else out there doing accordion programs?