Weddingbee Blog

By now, you all know that I love me some paper, so it should come as no surprise that I dedicated a lot of time to our ceremony programs.

I wanted our programs to be a little different than the folded piece of paper you typically see at weddings. To accomplish this, I decided to go with a different shape: a square.

The cover of the program was printed on cardstock and featured the same calligraphy as our save-the-dates and invitations. The other font (Copperplate Light) and the Chicago star also carry over from the save-the-dates and invitations.

We wrote a note to our family and friends, thanking them for coming.

On the next two pages, we listed everyone involved in the wedding. We are fortunate to have amazing family members and friends who were able to help out in every aspect of our wedding. My uncle is a priest. He baptized me, and he married us. Our friends served as musicians, Eucharistic ministers, ushers and program hander-outers, and family members served as readers and gift bearers.

On the next page, the Mass details began. Because the chapel we got married in isn’t a parish, there are no hymnals for people to use during Mass. Therefore, I wanted to include all the music and readings in our programs.

Getting all the music was the hardest part of making our programs. Fortunately, my parents and a couple of our friends are church musicians, so we had easy access to the sheet music we needed. All it took was compiling the music, scanning it into the computer, and using a little Photoshop magic to size it all up.

On the last page, we included a remembrance for my grandfather and information on the reception. Because we had three hours between the end of the ceremony and beginning of the reception, we included information on our website about what to do in downtown Chicago. In our programs, we included our website information and a QR code so people could pull it up on their phones instantly.

Getting all of these bad boys printed was a frustrating journey. There’s a reason everyone has the same folded 8.5 x 11 programs; they’re much simpler to print! With the size and the need to print full bleed, this project presented a major challenge. Thankfully, the people at my neighborhood FedEx Office were amazingly helpful and went above and beyond to make it happen. They turned out great and helped our guests turn our ceremony into a beautiful celebration.

Did you put a lot of work into your programs?