Mine at Last: Getting with the Program

Mr. Palindrome's sweet cousin handed out programs on the day of our wedding.  She was so excited to be part of the festivities and took her duties quite seriously.

I was really proud of how they turned out, but of course, there's a whole, long back story.

One day, I was at Michael's.  (Aside: Michael's probably wonders where the looney scavenging for black and white goods on discount went - or maybe they just think I morphed into the the lavender and sage hunting crazy getting married in June?)  Since I had previously left some very good, cheap paper in our wedding colors on the shelf to never be found again, I jumped at the chance to buy them out of 3 stacks of 8x8 crafting paper.  I had no earthly idea what I was going to use them for, but gosh darn it, I would have them laying around when the time was right.

The time was right when I conceived of the idea to make programs.  I quickly cut out a few pieces of scrap paper to ensure the measurements would work out.  Lo and behold, if I cut the 8x8 sheets exactly in half and then created a tri-fold program on 8.5x11, I could get two programs from each larger piece of paper and tuck them neatly into their little jackets.

It took a few hours and several printing tests, but I finally was able to squeeze all of the information we wanted into the allotted space, using Publisher.

I used Abigail font for the titles and Californian FB for the rest of the text (with some italicized).  Both of these fonts were standard in my version of Office.  I set the margins so that they would all be equal when I cut down the middle of the paper.  In execution, I sent a PDF to Kinko's and had them print and cut.  For $24 dollars, it was definitely a sanity saver not having to print double-sided on my home printer and cut each by hand.

The day after Christmas, I set my family to work.  I had previously cut and folded all of the jackets while burning through my Netflix queue, but tri-folding the freshly printed insides was taking a bit of time.   I also had a 1/16" hole punch that was the needle eye to my 1/8" ribbon camel.  I also had quite a bit of pre-cut ribbon; however, I overestimate how many we would get from each roll.  Since we needed more ribbon, I decided to break down and buy the 1/8" hole punch while at Michael's.  To top it all off, I had a ribbon length sample from a previous project, so Motherdrome inadvertently cut all of the new ribbon into ties about 2 inches short, making them harder, but not impossible to tie.  There was some rough going, but nothing says holiday cheer like everyone gathered around the table, carols on the radio, and teaching your Dad how to handle the bone folder.  He's a regular Martha Stewart now!

Did you con your family into wedding craft projects during a holiday gathering?

*First two photographs by our wonderful photographer Sam Hughes, and the rest by me.