Weddingbee Blog

Sorry I’ve been absent for a while. Those thank you notes took longer than I thought! Before I start my official recaps I wanted tell you all about some things I didn’t get to blog about before the wedding. I didn’t have time to write about them because I was scrambling to finish them!

The weeks leading up to the wedding were crazy. We were constantly working on projects that needed to be finished before we traveled to California. It was a stressful time, and some of our projects were not going as smoothly as we would have hoped. I have to say our biggest stress was caused by our programs.

Designing them was actually the easy part. I found the template for our programs by Googling “Wedding program template.” On the results list is a link that says, “[doc] Free wedding program template.” Clicking on it automatically downloads a template for Word that looks like this:

Personal screenshots of template

We changed it around a bit to fit with our ceremony. We could have created our own program from scratch, but it was sooo helpful having the template and just plugging in our information. After I filled it in, Mr. Castle took over making it look pretty in Photoshop. He used the same fonts that are featured on all our our details: the table numbers, escorts cards, favor labels, etc. He added a photo from our engagement pictures and created us a beautiful program!

Personal images

When it came to printing we thought we’d save some money and print them ourselves at home. We printed them on some card stock that I had bought on sale from Michaels. We started printing them and ran into an annoying problem: For some reason our printer was using color ink even though the programs should have only required black ink. We tried to change the settings, we searched online for an answer, and for the life of us we couldn’t figure out why our printer was being so stupid! Also it was taking about three minutes to print one page. We used up two cartridges of color ink and then decided to give up. At that point we had printed the inside of all the programs and had about 50 more of the cover to print. I took the unfinished ones to Office Depot, something we should have done in the first place, and they printed the rest in 10 minutes. Lesson learned—some things are best left to professionals.

We did have some luck with our other DIY home-printing projects. Before printing the programs and wasting all that ink, we printed out escort cards! Designed of course by Mr. Castle.

Keeping with our “theater” theme, our escort cards were our guests’ “tickets” to find their seats.

Next we printed our custom wine-bottle favor labels. Mr. Castle designed a separate label for white and red with a cute quote to go along with each. We bought full-sheet label paper and printed six labels per sheet. I cut them all to size with my fancy paper trimmer. We put a label on a tester bottle to see how they looked.

It’s hard to read, but it says, “A bottle of red for joining us as we wed!”

The white reads, “A bottle of white for joining us on our big night.”

And finally one of my favorite details: Our place cards. Early on I had the idea to incorporate orange Tic Tacs into our wedding. Not only are they the best flavor, in my opinion, but I also loved the pop of orange they would bring. We decided to make our own labels and use them as place cards. Once again, Mr. Castle went to work creating a layout and then filling in each guest’s name. We make a good team. I come up with the idea and he executes the project!

We made a test label with our cat’s name. The label reads, “Orange you happy for Sharon & Jeff?”

The date on the top

A cute poem on the back reads, “Shake these mints for marital bliss & keep on shaking until they kiss!”

All of these projects took a lot of time, which is why I never wrote about them until now! We designed, printed, and cut all the labels in New York, and that was only the first phase of these projects. We still had to add the labels to the wine and Tic Tacs, which were waiting for us in California. We packed up our labels, programs, and other wedding projects and got ready to head west!

A failed stowaway attempt. Our boys were not happy that they couldn’t come to the wedding.

Did you have to wait to finish a project until you were at your wedding location? Anyone else have any printing fiascoes?

All photos are personal.