Program Mock-Up

As of late, one of my favorite activities has become searching through the nearly endless amount of wedding pictures online to gain inspiration for my next DIY project. My wedding has a nautical theme, but I am also striving to make my wedding unique in every way I can. I guess that is the whole purpose of making pretty much everything that I can from scratch, to make it mine. Programs are no different. I was searching through Purple Weddings and I found the wedding programs pictured to the left. I instantly fell in love with them. I love how they are different from the traditional fold-paper-in-half-to-make-a-booklet programs, and the overall look of them sitting in the basket caught my eye as well. So then I did as any other crafter would do, I looked at the picture again, thought about it, and figured out how to make it.

I want to stress that this is definitely a program mock-up. I wanted to use supplies that I had around the house to see if I could make the programs, as well as to determine what materials would be necessary to make the 100 or so that I am going to need for the big day. I also wanted to gauge just how much work went into each one so I could determine if this was something I wanted to do over 100 times. What I came up with is pictured on the right.

The lighting wasn't the greatest when i took the picture, but the card stock is purple, the ribbon is a light green, the paper is standard white print paper, and the tags were cut out of some left over scrapbooking paper I had kicking around. In terms of making the mock-up, the biggest pain was creating a template on Open Office. I had to do a bit of math when formating the page, and I ended up having to print the whole thing three times before I was able to get the margins right and the text centered. If anyone would like the template that I created, just comment to my post with your e-mail and I'll send a copy your way. Once I got the pages to print correctly, construction was relatively simple. I cut the pages out with a paper cutter so they were all the same size, then I cut an 8 1/2" by 11" sheet of card stock in half and folded the top over 1 1/2". I punched holes with a smaller hole punch, I believe I used a 1/8" punch, but I'm not 100% sure. Finally I ran about 12" of ribbon through and tied a bow. I strung two tags on the ribbon before tying the bow. The first tag says "Jennifer and Thomas" and the second tag says "9.10.11".

The mock-up of my program is currently 7 pages long. That sounds like a lot, but each page is only about 5"x5". I need to tweak my template a bit, because at the present time, just the wedding party takes up three pages. I also have a page listing the order of the ceremony, a page explaining our ceremony because we are having a non-traditional type of wedding, a page explaining the history of Fort Popham, and a "special thanks" page. It definitely is not perfect, but I have a year.

Overall, these are fairly easy to make, and I really love the way they look when they are completed, which totally justifies the work involved. For the finished product, I plan to use the same type of purple cardstock that I use for my invitations, with ivory paper for the pages. I will probably use the same type of ribbon as in the mock-up, but I'm thinking about just tying it in a knot and gluing a sea-shell on top so that the programs will match my flower cones. As for the tags, I'm planning on using vellum so that the wording shows up better, and I will probably use simple rectangles so that I can print everything. So far, so good... I'm sure that come spring I will be saying otherwise.