DIY Wedding Revisited: Programs

Your programs will set the stage for the ceremony and are the first thing the guest pick up when they arrive.  They are also something a guest will read out of interest or boredom while waiting for the ceremony to start.  I DIYed my entire programs from creating the graphics and design to, with a little a lot of help assembling these babies.  I choose to do a light aqua cardstock backing with four tiered overlapping sections.  The first section was a graphic of our names and included our wedding date and church name.

The second portion was acknowledgements where we thanked everyone for their support, especially our parents.  We had remembrance lilys at the altar for those special people in our lives who had passed before us and the acknowledgements was where we choose to explain this remembrance.    

The ceremony part is pretty self explanatory.  Depending on your religion or the type of ceremony you are having it guides guest through the experience.  This may be important if you are deviating from tradition, if some guests are from different religions or cultures and aren’t familiar with the ceremony, or just for guests to follow along.     

We also choose to include the wedding party in the program.  We had the traditional bridesmaids and groomsmen, but also included personal attendants and a little tradition we have up north called “host couples”….who really are your wedding day slaves and have to schlep your presents around and attend to your needs.  We love host couples.      

I will not lie.  These programs were a beeyotch to make.  I ordered the cardstock and paper from paper and more, a fabulous paper store online with great rates.  To optimize paper I cut the cardstock in half lengthwise (so I could make two programs per sheet) and then used that width to dictate the width of my paper.  I created the graphics in word and power point. 

**Update: After I took some measurements again and ripped apart one poor program I made some new discoveries.  Since all the text was too wide I had to go with one sheet of cardstock per program.  Also I discovered that I stapled all the tiers together at the top!

It is tricky to get all sections to be of equal width and also to get your tiers to line up perfectly so all of the footers are showing and your “wedding party” section isn’t half covered up by your “ceremony” section.  Needless to say there were a lot of test pages printed.  Then I measured them out and put them in a word document so I could get as many sections per paper as possible.  After that I headed off to Office Max with the files in the jump drive and a song in my heart.  I then took several trips back to Office Max so their computer could read my files.  I choose Office Max to do my printing so it would be of higher quality and I could save on my ink.

After all was said and done, everything was printed, all the materials were gathered I headed off to my Mother-in-laws house to assemble.  I used the cheap thin ribbon from Michaels to assemble this thing and a X-acto knife to cut slits to thread the ribbon through. The key to making sure the top part of the cardstock stays creased (to hide your top edges) is lots of pressure on the crease and hot glue.  Then cut, thread, and tie. 

My mother in law, a friend, and myself started out in the morning and after 3 hours of assembling these babies we called in the reinforcements.  4 more helping hands showed up it only took us eehhh 2-3 MORE HOURS to get them all assembled.  There was a slight oversight on my part of the actual time commitment, but I wouldn’t have changed a thing. They were prefect and I loved them so much that all the blood, sweat, hot glue burns, and tears were worth it! Due to the amount of requests for a template for these programs I have provided one here!      

We put them in a basket on the wedding day and they looked amazing!  This was definitely a DIY triumph!

*Pictures of the wedding day were taken exclusively by Amber Asman of asmanphotography.  In short, she rocks.