The Asshole Bride says what etiquette prevents YOU from saying. Maybe you don’t have the exact same issues as she does, but you can probably still identify with her stories. Watch out – in case the title didn’t give it away, there’s some profanity in here.
Wedding programs can be one of the more confusing aspects of wedding stationery. The rest is very straight forward, and you can find thousands of examples and templates. But everyone’s programs are different. Some people use just a timeline, name who is in the wedding party, and maybe their music choices. Other people, like myself, have way more information they need to relay to their guests than can be crammed onto a single piece of card stock. After poking around the internet for ideas, I found someone had done up a nice, if slightly smart-assed, guide to survive their wedding. Especially when doing a wedding on a budget, a lot of your guests may be surprised by events and choices. I knew my wedding was going to be following a bit of a non conventional timeline so I set off on making a program inspired by this guide.
I made up a fantastic little cover that matched our invitations, and started off with a note from the bride and groom inside the cover. We, like so many other couples these days, had opted for an unplugged ceremony and wanted to make sure it was known to all guests so we kindly explained what it meant and that there would be professional photos for all to share. On the next page we laid out a rough timeline of the evening. For our centerfold, we included a map of our venue, which was a local zoo, to help people find their way around. If we didn’t need that, I imagine here I would have listed things like what song our first dance was, and the Maid of Honor’s name.
The last two pages acted like a FAQs section. Where do we go? What do we eat? Why was the ceremony so short? What do you mean if I clink my glass you won’t stop eating and kiss??? I answered all these things with sass and comedy, because that’s who we are. We made sure to cover our bases so that our guests would be able to enjoy the night as we envisioned, instead of being confused by the order of events and non-traditional things we added in.
Now to print them! This turned out to be one of the most surprisingly large expenses in my entire wedding planning process. I had 2 options, buy a whole new round of ink cartridges for my printer (roughly $50) and some nice paper (another $10+ depending on the paper) and spend hours putting them together. The amount of time it would need I just didn’t have. So I figured I’d spend a little extra to save some sanity and started pricing out having them printed.
Holy crap. Printing stuff like this was way more expensive than I ever thought. VistaPrint, my go to cheap printing service doesn’t even offer anything close. So Staples and FedEx Office it was.
Staples didn’t offer online pricing, so I had to make the call and ask an employee. For 150 copies that were stapled it would cost me around $200 with tax. I then went to the FedEx Office site and started a custom print job. For 150 copies, folded but not stapled, it was $368.75 plus tax. I even called a few local printers all quoting me over $200 for the job. Looked like I had to suck it up and do it myself right?
Surprisingly, no. I found a website called Overnight Prints. They’re running a sale on booklets as low as $0.24 per piece. I got my 150 programs with tax and shipping for $65 total. The only issue is their slightly long turnaround time. 4 weeks is standard, but for 3 dollars extra on shipping I received them within about a week. I’m sure your time may vary depending on location and their current backlog of orders, but they showed up just as pretty, if not prettier than had I done them myself, and for about the same price as well!
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