Weddingbee Blog

Inspired by Mrs. Joey’s fabulous accordion fold programs, Mr. Dolphin and I embarked on a long and labor intensive journey to create these babies. Wait… I have to stop for a moment and just tell you all how much I love the hive—there is so much help and inspiration here. When it came to actually getting our programs to sit properly in our little basket, Miss Cola had already come up with the perfect solution and shared it with us. She is so clever!

I had been coveting sweet accordion fold programs for MONTHS (should I say years?). But, time and time again Mr. Dolphin would say ’no’, deeming them expensive and too much work. I somehow convinced him that we should do them about 4 weeks ago, and he jumped right on board. We have this saying around our house (especially when it comes to wedding DIYs)—if you’re going to do it, then you better do it right.

Following the instructions given by the sweet Mrs. Joey in her post, we made our accordion inserts legal size (so that we could print them on our laser printer). Now, I would reveal the inside of our programs, but I’d rather leave those a mystery for now, as Mr. Dolphin and I have included a few things in there for our guests’ eyes, and we’d like to keep some part of our wedding a secret (I know… this is sorta difficult when you blog)!

But, I shall show you the cover, ’cause I loves it, and it makes me happy.

Mr. Dolphin and I saved time/aggravation by not gluing our program title/cover but rather ordering labels from OnlineLabels (I swear we must be their new best friends, we’ve ordered so much from them) and printing our cover design on them. It made for super easy and fast sticker-ing of these bad boys to the covers. Mr. Dolphin was so clever as to suggest we add a notch to each side of the program so that our ribbon would stay properly in place, keeping the program closed until our guests open them. But, I couldn’t just ’freely’ notch the sides of these beautiful programs. So I had Mr. Dolphin pick me up a little scrapbooking tool (see the green punch-thing in the picture below), and he got to work ’perfectly’ notching our programs. What a sweet thing, he was so careful as to do it right. I love him.

Bought at Michaels Craft store for $4.99

After cutting, taping, cutting more, tying, and sticker-ing these babies, we put them in a little basket ala Miss Cola.

Yes… your eyes do not deceive you, our programs are on a Gator rug. Yes.. we have one… and we LOVE IT.

Our programs are rather small, approx. 4″ x 5″, so we had to prop them up by using floral foam wrapped in left over tulle we had laying around. We also followed the clever Miss Cola’s instructions, sticking faux daisies in floral foam and wrapping the foam with leftover yellow ribbon from our pomanders. I affixed the little sign to the front of the basket with paper clips taped to the sign and clipped to the basket. Overall, we are seriously happy with how they turned out.

Mr. Dolphin keeps saying that if we go to anyone’s house who attended our wedding, and one of our programs aren’t prominently displayed, he is going to de-friend them. Silly Mr. Dolphin!

And what would a DIY project post be without the approval of Dolphin Kitty?

Dolphin Kitty making sure the flowers are up to her standards of excellence.

It sort of feels weird not having Dolphin Kitty at our wedding since she has been soooo involved in all our projects. She will be vacationing with Maxwell Kittnah over at Dolphin Momma’s and Dolphin Dad’s while we are honeymooning. They are going to have a blast. I secretly think they have a ’thing’ for each other… but that is another whole story.

And I simply cannot end this post without the image below… what Mr. Dolphin and I call my ’bride-slave’ chair.

Mr. Dolphin set this up for me the week classes ended. He knew I wanted to catch up on all my TV shows I had missed, and he still wanted me to get some of our programs done at the same time. So he moved our coffee table and set up a workstation for me to work on our programs at while he was at work. How sweet of him… ?

But the ’bride-slave’ chair surely did its job, and I managed to bust out tons of programs before he got home.

What was your most labor intensive DIY project? Did your fiance help you out?