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Tuxedo-Pocket Programs

I wanted to share my wedding invitations as an example of the stationary I handcrafted for our wedding. Unfortunately, I don’t have any invitations left, or even a picture. I spend dozens (and dozens!) of hours silkscreening my invitations, and I don’t even have one picture of all that work. This is why it is crucial to drastically overestimate the number of invitations you may need, if your family is as wishy-washy and uncommitted as that of my husband. Our limiting factor for our wedding was the space – our ceremony room held 180 individuals, maximum. Due to that constraint, we had an A list, and unfortunately, also had to have a B list. I had counted the number of invites I would need if we went through every single person on the A list and on the B list… and added 40, “just in case.”

People, this STILL wasn’t enough. Forty extra invitations… and I still ran out. My husband’s family treated our (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime wedding (for our families, a wedding is a rare event – my husband and I are both only children and only grandchildren on both sides, so it’s not like they can just wait for the next wedding to come along!) like a family reunion. Roughly 30 of his family members RSVP’d yes… and then a few weeks later called back and changed their mind, because so-and-so (a cousin, niece, aunt, sibling, whomever) wasn’t going to make it to the wedding, so they decided not to come (this was, of course, on top of the other guests who declined attendance from the beginning). As we had to do significant trimming of our initial list even to get down to a B list, we had lots of family friends who were thrilled to come… but that required invitations. And thus, I ran through all of ours. And the ones I had saved for myself, and sent to my parents, and my mother-in-law, and even had to ask my labmates for the invitations I had send to them (tacky, yes, but as a bunch of bachelors, they had all admitted that they were just going to throw the invitation out anyway). The moral of this story is that you can NEVER have too many invitations – and if you care about your invites, TAKE A PICTURE before you send them all away!

Instead, what I can offer are pictures of my second-favorite paper product – our programs. When it came to program design, I had one simple requirement: the program had to be small enough to fit comfortable into a tuxedo pocket. I have been to so many weddings and received large programs and not known what to do with them, but a small program fits easily into a clutch or into the pocket of my husband’s tuxedo. Plus, it fits perfectly onto a folded half-sheet of paper!

sewn program
{Jennifer Childress Photography}

For the programs, I used Pearl White metallic cardstock for the cover and vellum for the overlays over the picture (both from Paper and More), and heavy pure white text paper from Paper Source for the insert sheets. To stitch the sheets together, I punched a hole through the assembled booklet spine using a pushpin, and sewed them together using crochet cable thread (the same thread I used to crochet the yarmulkes). For the cover, I originally considered purchasing a custom stamp with our logo and then embossing from the stamp, but I realized that if I ran the cardstock through our Inkjet printer and printed straight onto the paper and dumped the embossing powder on immediately after it came through the printer, the ink was still damp enough to hold the embossing powder.

indesign program
{author’s personal collection}

For me, the most difficult part of the programs was setting up the template to maximize printer space and minimize wasted paper, so i included the template I used from InDesign, as I thought perhaps someone else would find it useful!

Download Here