Wedding programs.

I thought I might as well continue posting some of the things that I made for our wedding. This layered program I made using a template that I downloaded from Vibride.com http://www.vibrantbride.com/article/id/414 I had to do some tweaking to get things the way I wanted them, but in general, it was an easy document to use and I was pleased with the results!For the back, I took a piece of black cardstock (8.5 by 11) and cut it in half hotdog style (for all you fellow teachers out there) so that it was 4.25 x 11. That meant I got two from each page.
Once I had the pages all figured out in my document (I recommend that you save frequently as you are designing these) , I printed them on ivory cardstock. I could print 2 pages on each piece of 8.5 x 11 cardstock. When I cut these out, I had to make them a bit narrower so that there would be some of the black showing on the sides. I think each became 4" wide and the lengths were determined by the cutline which printed out. Both the black and the ivory cardstock I bought in packages from Michael's for about $4/pack of 50 sheets.
I played with different ideas for attaching them together. I hole punched using a small punch. This is hard on the hand because all the layers together are thick, and I could only do so many at a time before I had to take a break. If you used paper or vellum for the layers then it wouldn't be so tough. The first one I tried was to thread black ribbon through the holes and tie it in a bow. This was hard to do as I haven't perfected my bowtying yet and I was using narrow ribbon. Then I tried just using brass brads but it looked kind of cheap. I added rhinestones to the brads and that still didn't look right. Finally, I decided to thread the black ribbon through the holes front to back and then back up through to the front again. I trimmed the ends and added bling to cover the holes. I used white rhinestones that I found in the $1.50 bin at Michael's. They came in a package exactly like the gold ones pictured above. I used 2 for each program that were the same size, but I didn't worry about keeping all the progrmas the same. Nobody noticed that some had larger bling then otheres! They looked great and added an old time feel to the programs. Our wedding had a 1930s theme to it so making something seem not so new or modern was important to me.

Hope that some brides-to-be find this post useful. Although it took a bit of time because I was doing it by myself. If you set up an assembly line of girlfriends it would take no time at all and I had so much positive feedback on them!