Friday, July 8, 2011

DIY Wedding Programs and Wedding Menus

As I was having a great time designing the wedding programs, table cards, table center pieces, and dinner menus, I was also extremely picky on all of the same details; I wasn’t going to be happy unless all of the paper details were coordinated! Deep eggplant colored cardstock overlaid with White Linen cardstock (both 60lbs) with purple, Harrington font.IMG_8793The easiest way to cut all of these programs (all 75 of them!) was to plan to cut the width of purple cardstock (regular letter paper size- 8.5 x 11”) in half, and then format the printed (white paper) so that when cut it left a 1/4” boarder of the purple showing. To clarify, the purple card stock was cut in half to 8.5 x 5.5”, and for the white printed paper, I created a table on Microsoft Word was set at 8x5” and did all of the printing inside of that! If you are making these because of my post and you can’t figure it out (no seriously this was the most annoying part of the entire process) just email and I’ll try to help! Please remember to buy extra of EVERYTHING that you need (card stock, ribbon, popsicle sticks, etc.) for “test” samples and mess-ups!

After I figured out all of the measurements and finished driving the Boss nuts with his printer occupied for the entire day, I moved on to my “embossing project”! A good friend of mine made her own baby shower invitations, and the paper part of the invitation was super cute, however what really added a professional (and adorable) look to the invites was the embossing stamp that she added to the top! So I copied her idea, called and asked her for instructions, and finally made my way down to the store the paper source” to buy the goods!

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(Embossing turned out to be pretty inexpensive, all I needed was the embossing powder and heat gun. I had already picked up the wedding stamp a while ago on sale at Michaels!)

So I lined up a few samples. Stamped, poured the embossing powder, and hit it with the heat gun… voilĂ ! All in the matter of seconds!

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One wedding detail that my mom played and integral part in was tying bows! Now tying bows might not sound too hard, but this lady is known at home for her ability to repetitively tie the most adorable and perfect little bows!

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Seriously, there were over 500 bows tied that weekend… and she did them ALL!  And the first thing she tied all of the bows for were the Wedding programs!

With the bows tied, the stamps embossed, cardstock measured and cut, it was time to attach the whole thing to the extra wide popsicle sticks and add the bow! We added the popsicle stick because the temperatures in the Dominican were quiet “warm” and even though we had an amazing breeze off of the water, I couldn’t guarantee that would be the case on the big day… I figured the best option would be to give our guests their own fans!

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And unfortunately this is the only picture that I actually have of the finished product! I must have had too much going on that weekend to have be thinking clearly! All the same, I think you get the picture!

Moving on to the Menu Cards!

Since we didn’t find out until pretty much the last minute if we were going to be “allowed” to have plated dinners on the beach or not, these menus were a little more last minute that I would have liked. Everything was measured and cut ahead of time, but there was no way to get the embossing done “pre-printing”, so I ended up just changing the plan from my sand dollar stamp to printing the sand dollar right onto the menu. By adding the sand dollar to the menu it helped tie in the sand dollar name cards/ ornaments and the beach theme!

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In the end, although I stressed about these a little, I think that they came out pretty nice!

If you are looking to create similar menus for a wedding or an upcoming dinner party these were quite simple to make as well! This time instead of cutting the card stock in half, I cut it into thirds (about 3.7”). The same goes with the white card stock, I set up 3 tables on Microsoft Word that allowed for 1/4” of the purple card stock to show through the sides; this was approximately 3.2” wide and 8” long.

My last tip of the day for making your own programs and menus is if you do not have access to a large paper cutter at your work or school, please do yourself a favor and go to staples (I did my price shopping, and they have the best bang for your buck!) and purchase one of their at home paper cutters that comes with the fold out ruler! Seriously cutting out that many papers with scissors is an awful task that would waste so much time with using the ruler to pre-mark lines, and I just do not think you will get as nice of a result!

Well that is it! I hope if you have been reading over the last few days that you are enjoying the wedding deets, there are a few more posts to come! Eventually I’ll poke in some updates on where the heck we are on the honeymoon! If I haven’t mentioned it yet, the honeymoon is a surprise and I won’t know where we’re going till we get there!

Wedding Photo Update:

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2 comments:

fotocopy murah jakarta said... Best Blogger Tips[Reply to comment]Best Blogger Templates

Thank you because you have been willing to share information with us. All that is written here, because you care about us.

Joel Jackson said... Best Blogger Tips[Reply to comment]Best Blogger Templates

I am impressed on your work.The way how to make it was very clearly described.It was very simple and beautiful.Thanks for it.

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