Weddingbee Blog

Remember these babies from way back when? Hive, I can’t even begin to express how elated I am that Mr. Tartlet finished these over the weekend. Our wedding programs evolved from being a couple pieces of cardboard covered in fabric to something incredibly precious that I’m so in love with—and Mr. Tartlet is pretty proud of, too.

After waffling for quite some time on how to keep the booklets shut, Mr. Tartlet purchased assorted wooden buttons and some leather cord from Jo-Ann to create these cute closures. He also tried other combinations using wooden beads, black leather, hemp, and copper wire (instead of the knot) but we felt that au naturale looked the best with our wedding’s moderately rustic vibe.

He hammered the loose ends flat before attaching them to the covers. This made a huge difference when it came time to put in the accordion-style inserts.

He applied a small dab of glue to attach the flattened cord at the middle of the covers:

And then put some pressure on it while it dried:

Voila, button closures that wrapped around the front cover to make a charming little booklet!

The back cover with closures

Front and back covers held together

To spice up the front covers, I designed and custom ordered a 3×3 stamp through RubberStamps.net. We tested various shades of ink out on a scrap piece of book cloth until we found one (Archival Inkpad in Sepia) that had the color saturation we liked and didn’t bleed all over the place.

Once we decided on an ink color, it was just a matter of stamping away:

An oversized ink pad helped with how large the stamp was.

We ended up having to improvise as we went because even our favorite ink would diffuse out into the fabric as it slowly dried, resulting in fuzzy text that was still readable, but something we weren’t particularly satisfied with:

We sped up the drying process with the help of my hairdryer that hadn’t seen the light of day in many moons:

And were much happier with the result:

Mr. Tartlet had originally wanted to emboss the book covers, but I was over the moon about how the stamp made them look like a well-worn vintage book. Next, Mr. Tartlet cut an accordion panel to the dimensions of 5″ x 22.5″ from a 20″ x 26″ sheet of cover paper in moss green and glued it to the covers using our old standby Jade 403 PVA glue. This left a 0.25’’ border all around.

We ended up with a total of six panels to fill with wedding-related tidbits–but that’s a post for another day!

Did you take it down to the wire when it came to getting your wedding programs made in time?