Weddingbee Blog

I figured a long while back that we would be doing mass programs. Not all of our guests are Catholic, and programs would help them follow along, or at least know what to expect during the hour-long service. Programs would also be a great way to translate everything happening in English for the guests who speak no (or very little) English.

After we got the trilingual invites done, I knew that when the time came to do these programs they would be even more of a bitch. And for many months I just let that thought fester before it was time to deal with this bear.

How could this pretty program be so nasty?

Well…take a look at the inside:

That’s four spreads—or 16 pages—worth of program content. Much more than your ordinary Catholic program. Here you can see that after printing I was getting ready to sort the pages into order. There was no way I was hand cutting 560 pages, so I designed everything for standard A4 paper. No bleed.

I wrote out the program in English and included more than usual, because I wanted as much of the mass as possible to be understood by the whole audience. It was also important to include each reading for the American guests, because Sister Funnel Cake will read the first reading in German and Mr. Funnel Cake’s brother will read the second reading in Portuguese. If we didn’t put the English in there, not even Mama Funnel Cake could follow along!

After I was done writing, I needed Mr. Funnel Cake to help translate the mass parts. It. was. painful. Really, godawful painful. Mr. Funnel Cake doesn’t really like translating. In fact, you could say he hates it. There were definitely some tense moments as he struggled to figure out what the mass parts were in the other languages. He’d never seen it all written down like that before. It seemed like it took ages…but finally we were done putting the design together.

Here I had put all the pages in the right order and needed to fold each booklet for a saddle-stitch bind before hole punching.

Did you think Miss Designer was going to hand sew all these programs? Eff no. Mr. Hole Punch over there was really handy and quick. Quite irresistible, actually.

Once the holes were punched it was time to get to work.

I put together a program station, and Mr. Funnel Cake spent his weekend home from the army with me slipping silver cord into the programs so I could glue wax seals to bind them together. Ohhh yeah. Getting our money’s worth from that stamp!

Inside the booklet, I kept English on the left page and split German and Portuguese down the right.

This worked out pretty well because I put the music PDFs that my awesome music director supplied me in the English section and they occupied the whole page.

On the back was enough room for a simple map to the reception. I figured people might not take my route (I tried to keep it simple), but it has the address of both the church and reception site in case people get lost.

One hundred forty-ish programs done. Should be enough! Now we just need to pack them in our suitcases. No more time for shipping at this point.

If you have one, how much information did you include in your program?

*All pictures personal*