Weddingbee Blog

Lame title, I know. I just have no creative juice left in my body after the wedding…

It is no small understatement to say that I LOVE paper. Have I mentioned my childhood habit of smelling paper (especially Sanrio paper)? I have no idea why that stuff smells so good to me, but it does! I can’t resist smelling that stuff when it’s near me. Helloooooooooo Kitty!

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One of my fave paper resources is Kelly Paper - they have a ton of different paper in different weights, textures, and colors. You can purchase paper by the sheet or by the ream, which is super handy if you need a ton of paper for a large wedding, or if you just need to see (and smell) the paper in person before purchasing.

Mr. Ramen and I headed over one of the Kelly Paper branches in Phoenix to pick up some paper for our programs, escort cards, and other paper miscellania.

We walked out with 2 reams of paper, which we pretty much obliterated for our wedding. I really hope that either people are treasuring those paper items forever or at least recycled them… at any rate, we were able to find this beautiful blue paper that almost perfectly matched our invites.

Although I love how they look, I wanted to spare myself the labor of making ~250+ mini-booklet-type programs (and honestly, I was already going a little bit crazy between trying to figure out what the heck to do with our manzanita trees and trying to not flunk out of optometry school; another super-intensive project didn’t sound like a good idea… mostly, to Mr. R). We really wanted to come up with something unique.

After flipping thru one of my million-and-one wedding mags, I found a picture that I really liked (and looked easy to make)—a tri-fold program! This isn’t the exact picture, but I couldn’t find it online, but you get the idea.

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The only dilemma was how to make it look fresh, modern, and “wedding-y” and not like a church bulletin. Hrm. Mr. Ramen set about his Industrial Designer/groom duty, and began to design the program. I freakin’ married a genius. He took our circle design from our invites and incorporated them into our programs.

Mr. Ramen with his program baby…

So how did this bad boy come to be? Here’s the process…

After *many* trials, Mr. R finally got the circle to overlap at the right spots. So he got to printing. To save money (probably not time), we used his printer. This actually took a while because we had to print on both sides of the paper.

This is what the front of the programs look like printed - the blank strips on each end were trimmed off.

Mr. R added couple of very tiny little dots on the lines where the programs needed to be trimmed and folded. I was not very good at lining things up, so he did the majority of the folding/trimming, and I pretty much watched and took pictures. Hee hee! Actually, it was really sweet because MIL and FIL Ramen both helped us, as well as BIL/BM Ramen. They helped us cut ribbon and fold programs. It was so sweet!

On a trip to SF, I found a little shop called the Ribbonerie in Laurel Heights. While I was there, I dug through the discount ribbon bins and found this glorious spool of ribbon in the almost same shade of blue (plus a TON more that I used for other wedding projects), that surprisingly was more than enough to use with our programs. They literally have every type of ribbon in every single color imaginable. It blew my mind, aAnd I was in ribbon heaven.

Here’s what the programs look like, trimmed and folded and be-ribboned:

You can see how Mr. R changed up the conventional tri-fold design to be slightly offset (the flap hits the middle of the program instead of the right edge). Notice the perfect alignment of the circle - it is truly a thing of great pride! Oh man, if you could only see how much scratch paper we went through to get to this point of perfect alignment. And by we, I mean Mr. Ramen. Since I have no understanding of computer designing, I was pretty impressed with my almost-husband.

And when you open up the cover, it reveals our “theme” Bible verse. I dunno if theme is the right word, but it’s one of our favorites.

A close-up:

Being the stubbornly independent woman that I am, I decided that I needed to finish up the programs myself, especially since Mr. R had pretty much trimmed and folded all of the programs himself. So I be-ribboned using craft double-sided tape runners. But that wasn’t all!

Remember those little letterpressed tags we had made with our invites? The ones with our initials and wedding date? When we designed our invites, we made it so that all parts of our invite fit onto an 8 1/2×11 sheet of paper. We had a bit of dead space, so we decided to fill it with these cute little tags! My personal fave is the one with the dots. What is my deal with dots? I have no clue. And what were we going to do with these tags? Yeah, I had no clue about that either.

When we were designing the programs, it was like a flash of genius - why not use the little tags to seal them? Thankfully, Mr. R used the laser-cutter at his job to cut out all ~500+ tags. Can you imagine cutting them out by hand? Yeah, I totally had wedding-DIY fever, because I was actually thinking of attempting that. Crazy, I tell you!

So I took the little laser cut tags and then promptly affixed them to the programs with 2 glue dots. The finished product:

The moment you’ve all been waiting for…. some pro-pics from Lunaphoto!

Programs in the basket…

And in use…