Program DIY, Part 2

So last week I showed you guys the inside of the programs, and recently my mom, FMIL, and MOH came over to help me complete them, an easy but time consuming task, made a lot more fun by their company.


I had designed and printed the covers a few months prior at, where else, my beloved Cards and Pockets. I had 6 x 12 inch booklets made and scored so I could fold them into 6 x 6 inch booklets. I printed them on the Opal Stardream cardstock I've used for all my wedding tasks so far, and designed a fairly simple cover:

Just our names, wedding date, and wedding location.

A heads up if you go this route, it's not exactly budget friendly. 225 covers cost me $186, and that is before the cost of resume paper, embellishments, and tools used.

To keep up with our lace and pearls theme, I purchased a beautiful lace from MJ Trim here in New York City. Unfortunately, there was no name or style  number printed on it, but here's what it looked like:

Yes that's right, I set out a Christmas tablecloth in July...didn't want to wreck my mom's table with glue!

I cut 225 strips that were about 6 and 1/4 inches- I wanted the lace to be longer than the program.

We formed an assembly line. My mom attached the covers and the insides using a long reach stapler, which I think is a great way to make booklets. The long reach stapler allows you to set the size so that you can staple papers up to 12 inches long, rather than using a conventional stapler, which wouldn't have reached the binding.

After stapling, she handed the programs off to the rest of us, who used Mod Podge and paintbrushes to apply the lace. We applied it to the front cover and folded it over the spine to hide the staples and leave a border near the spine on the back cover.

Since the lace strips were longer than the program, once the glue dried we just cut the extra edges off, which gave us a nice straight cut. That way, you don't have to worry about cutting the lace straight at the beginning.

The finished product (also displayed on a heinous tablecloth, sorry!)

I'm very pleased with how they came out. They're definitely of a more formal and less trend-forward rustic look, and they were a heck of a lot of work, but I'm glad we did them.

If you're going to attempt a similar project my only advice would be to literally start four months in advance. By the time I got all our text together (and verified by our officiants), designed everything in Word, and ordered sample programs, it was already mid April, and I'd started the project in January.

What are you doing for programs?