Posted Saturday, September 27, 2008 11:01 AM
I've had a lot of inquiries about the programs we made both from the message boards, and also left here on my blog. I figured I'd revisit this project to leave some more detailed instructions and also show a picture of them from the wedding day! I'll start with the eye candy first, here's what they looked like on the wedding day:
Ok, so the background, I bought a Martha Stewart Weddings Magazine (one of many) about a year ago that had a whole bunch of different program ideas in one of their articles. I completely fell in love with an accordion fold program that had letterpress flowers and text on the front and back covers. They were gorgeous! I love the look of letter press, but it is not something that was in our budget, and the flowers don't really work with whatever "theme" we had going on, so those were scrapped. But, I did keep with the general structure of the program.
Here's a stack of them after they were finished, including shots of the inside.
Now for what everyone really wants to see... the instructions! I have to start this off by saying I apologize for the picture quality. They aren't mine, I took photos of pages in Martha Stewart Weddings that showed how this was done. You can also consider that my credit to using something of Martha's, I am by no means taking credit for this as my own. I'm just passing this on to the masses that may have missed this wonderful issue of MS Weddings. Love ya Martha, kisses!
Step 1
You need to create a insert that is 5 inches by 14 3/4 inches. The insert will be made up of four panels about 3 3/4 inches by 5 inches. Two of these inserts will fit on one 11x17 paper. By the way, I used just regular paper for the inside portion of the program. The covers of the program were made using cardstock and sized 4 1/8 inches by 5 1/2 inches.
Martha's directions states they put crop marks in the corners of their 11x17 pages to make it easier for cutting and to mark the locations for folds. I'll be honest, I was getting pretty tired of trimming paper after all the DIY paper items we had done by that point and I paid Office Depot about $5 to cut all of our programs for us.
Use a bone folder to score the fold lines on the pages. I found it easier to do several at a time, especially since I was using a paper trimmer with the blade replace with a scoring blade. If I didn't do several at once the scoring blade ended up cutting through my paper instead. Plus it made this process go faster.
Step 2
If you don't cheat like I did, this where you will use a crafting knife and ruler (or perhaps a paper trimmer?) to trim the extra edges off your programs. Then start fold the paper along your score lines to create the accordion.
Step 3
Attach the front cover to the proper side of the accordion. Martha suggests using a glue stick, we passed on that since we didn't have much luck with ours on a previous project using the same cardstock. Instead we used a double sided tape runner. Whatever you use, make sure it's clear drying and non-greasy so it doesn't soak into your paper. Once the front cover is in place, flip the accordion over and attach the back cover in the same fashion making sure to have the back cover even on all sides with the front cover. Be sure to firmly press down on both covers after attaching them to the accordion.
VIOLA! FINIS! Martha also suggests placing them under a stack of books to press them nicely when you're finished.
If you're wondering about the cover of our programs, it was a simple monogram I printed out at home on cardstock and cut to size then glued to the front of the program. Easy peasy!
Posted Saturday, September 27, 2008 10:02 AM
I'm going to start this post out with a quick AW. I'm a Maggie Bride! For those who are unfamiliar with what that is, the dress designer Maggie Sottero has a part on their website where they show pictures of real brides who have submitted photos of them in their Maggie Sottero dresses. Here's what my page looks like:
So now for the pre-ceremony stuff!
First off we girls had to go geat beautified! Well, my girls were already beautiful, but they were transformed from "every day beautiful" to "special event stunning!" We didn't have a photographer who joined us at the salon, so all I have are some photos that my MOH took. Still, they're fun!
That's BM Gretchen still in the process of getting her hair done.
And here's me getting my hair teased. Ugh what a PITA that was to take down at the end of the night! My stylist, Diana, is fantastic! She's such a nice lady and has a great sense of humor, I'm usually laughing my butt off anytime I'm sitting in her chair.
Meanwhile after a night of gaming at our house...
The boys are at home probably still sleeping!
Now back to the hotel to get our make up done and get dressed!
As my freshly pressed dress awaits me, the girls and I are getting our make up done.
It looks like a drug deal, but we're really pooling some money to tip the make up artist!
As we're getting dressed, all the vendors are arriving and getting things set up. This includes my dad who is putting the cake topper he made on top of the cake after the baker delivered our cakes.
Oh! The boys have awoken! And they've made their way to the hotel and dressed as well!
More to come for pre-ceremony pictures in the next edition!
Posted Sunday, August 17, 2008 10:19 AM
We did a lot of DIY or low budget alternatives for things at our wedding. I've already blogged about many of them, but I'd like to share more about them since I've had quite a few people ask me questions about some of our day of details.
The things we DIYed for the wedding are:
I'll admit, I've been addicted to the Martha Stewart Weddings Magazine, it's even been real difficult for me not to buy since the wedding. She's got such great DIY projects, some easy, some real difficult and a lot of her projects can be use for non-wedding projects as well. I used her as inspiration for our programs and also our tissue paper pom poms which my photographer unknowingly took a photo of the two of them together.
And here's how the pom poms looked lining the aisle:
We did a lot of DIY paper items. When making our invitations, I bought a reem of card stock at Staples to print them on and had so much card stock left over that I was able to use if for our favor tags, the monogram on our programs, menu cards and also for the place cards. It cost me about $15 and I still have left over card stock. I'm not sure if I ever shared pictures of my invitations on my blog, at least I can't find them on it right now, so I'll share them possibly for the second time.
The RSVP card:
And using some of the remaining card stock (and a few other materials), we were able to make these:
Probably one of the best detail shots we have of the wedding showing our DIY projects is this one:
I left this picture bigger in hopes that you can see the details. Here you can see one of our table numbers, our favor boxes with our DIY favor tags, and also the "table runners" we got for super cheap! My photog must have gotten to the table before my DOC had a chance to set out the menu cards.
The table runners we used were a great deal I found out about from another May 08 Knottie. I got them from Linen Stock.com. I actually bought their Peau Satin chair sashes for $2 each (before shipping). The best part of it, I was able to sell them after the wedding and recover about half the money we spent on them.
The last DIY detail I have to share for now, is the gum drop toipary. It was a really easy DIY and lots of people thought it was cute. We only have 1 or 2 people try to eat the gum drops, despite our little sign asking people not to eat it.
Posted Friday, August 15, 2008 4:36 PM
One of the most entertaining parts of the wedding for our guests was the photo booth. We are so glad that we ended up doing one. Many of our guests had never seen that done at a wedding before, which made us feel good that we provided something new to them at weddings.
We decided to incorporate our guest book with the photo booth and set up a bunch of scrap book pages with photo corners and pretty scrap booking paper for a border and had our guests place their photo on a page and write a note on the page next to the photo if they wished. We got a lot of fun photos, and had some really good laughs the next day when we looked through our guest book.
We hired Clix Photo Booths out of Columbus, OH. www.clixphotobooths.com They occassionaly work in conjuction with our photographer and they were fantastic! The prices are really reasonable, and will travel, so check them out if you're interested in a photo booth for your wedding.
Here's just a few photos of the photo booth and from the photo booth. Enjoy!
Posted Monday, July 28, 2008 8:57 PM
Hello again!
Things have finally calmed down and I now have the time to be able to share all the details with you. I've decided to start with one of my favorite parts of our wedding... the cakes!
These really did have a lot of meaning to us. I surprised Anthony with a Groom's cake. He had absolutely no clue what I had up my sleeve and it was a really hard secret for me to keep. We will often times tease each other about the surprises we have for one another, but I really didn't want to risk that he might guess this surprise and ruin it. It's one thing when I'm surprising him with a new video game, it's another when it was something he thought we had absolutely no room in the budget for. Ultimately I clumped his cake in with all the "presents" or "surprises" I had for him on the wedding day.
Anthony is a HUGE gamer, so it was a no brainer for me to get a Groom's cake shaped like an Xbox 360. I took several pictures of his Xbox at home, as well as an image I found online that even included dimensions of the system, and took it to our baker. Anthony has one of the Halo 3 Xbox 360 systems, it's probably the ugliest shade of army green you've ever seen. I made sure the ladies at the bakery understood that I did not want the cake in that ugly green, but instead wanted it in the typical white the standard system comes in. In the end, I think they did a fantastic job on his cake. Don't you?
So now for the other cake. This is the one that had a lot of meaning to us. In about March of 2007, I was telling my coworker about my father's wood carving hobby. I even brought in a few of his minature bird pins to show her just a small bit of his talent. She was amazed (as we all are!) by his work. That's when she had the most brilliant idea! "You should have your dad make a topper for your cake!" My jaw dropped.... why didn't I think of that?! I'm 26 years old at the time and my dad has been carving song birds since I was about 12. Surely I could have put that together at some point. Right? Uhhh yeah, probably not.
So that night I went home and brought the idea up to Anthony. I think he thought it was a bit odd at first, but then we started talking about how meaningful it would be, that we'd get to keep our cake topper for a very, very long time, and possibly pass it along to our children. This appealed to him since he was already planning on getting a glass cabinet to put some of our wedding items on display in after the wedding. He pretty much agreed anyway because while he still had opinions and ideas for wedding stuff, for the most part he always seemed to rather just go with whatever idea I came up with (more like stole from the knot). After talking about it for a while, we thought asking him to do a pair of Cardinals would be cool since they're in our wedding colors and they wouldn't look completely lost since song birds didn't necessarily fit into the stripes and modern sort of look we'd been using on all our plans at that point. We decided to ask my dad and see what he thought of the idea.
It was perfect timing, my dad doesn't like working with big deadlines, because it takes the fun out of his hobby and makes it stressful. At this point we had about 14 months before the wedding. Plenty of time for him to work on it without any cause for stress. When we asked him, he was a bit hesitant, it wasn't because he didn't want to do it. He wasn't sure he could do it. How was it going to stay on the cake? Would it be too heavy? How on earth was he going to design the birds? Ultimately he agreed, and eventually he got really excited about the carving.
Summer 2007 was when he had planned to get the carving started and finished. Actually he had hoped to send it home with us when Anthony and I visited them in September 2007. Unfortunately, my dad had a bought with carpal tunnel and had to give up carving for a while. By the time we arrived, the birds were just taking a very rough shape from the blocks of wood the started out as. As time drew nearer and nearer to the wedding date, he had to start working more and more on the birds. My mom once said to me "I hope you understand your father is working 6 hours a day on his carving!" Ouch.. I felt bad. I know that's a long time for my dad to be carving. Usually he probably spent a max of 3 hours carving each day, and even then it wasn't every day of the week. This was 7 days a week so he could get it done before my parents had to leave to head out for the wedding. A week or two later my dad says to me "I'm really happy with this carving. In fact, I just told your mother, if this carving were for any other person, I'd be keeping it!" Oh boy, was I getting excited. My mom's words of praise of the carving over the phone started bringing me to tears when ever we talked about it.
Anthony and I didn't get to see the carving until a few days before the wedding when we met with the baker so she could see what she was working with and check colors since both she and my dad were using cherry blossoms. She wanted everything to match perfect. God she's great! 
I think I've talked the cake up enough and now it's time to shut up and share the pictures. I still smile every time I look at these photos. I'm so totally in love with our cake and especially our cake topper.
The birds up close, the flowers beneath them were also carved by my dad. The flowers all together make one block of wood, and each of the birds are another block of wood.
The cake tables at the reception.
Cutting the cake.
This is a good up close shot of the flowers on the cake, you can also see the photo book we had sitting on the cake table that showed pictures of the carving in the various stages of being created.
Posted Monday, June 23, 2008 1:14 PM
I know at one point I promised to post about the details of the wedding, and I will! I've just been so swamped with work lately that I haven't had the time/energy to bring myself to put together some thoughful posts and share all the details. I still plan on doing this, but only once things have calmed down for me. Hopefully this won't be too much longer.
I haven't even had a chance to go through our pro pictures to choose which ones the photographer is to used in our album, or even order photos for at home, or make a bio, other than the make shift ditty I put together super quick the week of the wedding with our teasers. I am SO not proud of that "bio" at all right now and plan to put together something real nice when I have the time.
For now, I haven't forgotten about you, and I definitely want to share everything, but I'm sure you understand my situation with work. I just thank god this business came on AFTER the wedding and HM! I would have gone absolutely insane trying to get all of this work done AND last minute prep for the wedding!
Posted Tuesday, May 06, 2008 9:05 AM
It's all done and over with! I can't believe how quickly it came and passed. It was fantastic! We can't stop talking about it at home, through email while we're at work, and even with our friends.
We're leaving for the honeymoon later this week, but in the meantime we've got to pack, start writing thank you notes and DH is working on our wedding DVD. We had a friend man a digital camcorder we bought to make a home video version of our wedding. He did a great job and it saved us a ton of money!
Here's a few non-pro pics for now. The photographer probably won't have all of our photos ready for a few more weeks, but I will be picking up 25 or so photos from him this evening so we can take them with us on our honeymoon since we'll be stopping to see my grandmother briefly while we're on the cruise!
Me and my handsome new husband!
Our cake with the cake topper my dad carved by hand.
Cutting the cake
First dance
Posted Thursday, April 24, 2008 8:00 PM
Ok, this'll be short and sweet, here are the directions from the MS magazine for the programs I last blogged about. You might have save this picture else where so you can see the image at full size and properly read the text.
And a picture of what Martha's version looked like
