DIY Wedding Challenge - Chicago

I DIY'ed a lot for my May 23, 2009 wedding for several reasons...first and foremost being for fun. DIY'ing wedding crafts rekindled my childhood love for crafts and I will say that it definitely spurred my creative side that has since taken off full speed ahead.

My favorite DIY project, of which I am extremely proud, are my fanned programs. My wedding ceremony will be casual and outdoors, so this project was all too fitting for the ceremony.

I first googled and found fan templates (just a simple outline of a fan) and copied and pasted 2 per page in a Word file (yes, I am one of those crazy people who does EVERYTHING in Word). It took some time and finness, but I created my 6 fins: a front page (including information such as B & G names, wedding date, time, and location), a "Participants" fan, "Ceremony" fan, two "Wedding Party" fans (all the ladies and then all the men), and lastly a "Thank You" fan.

I downloaded several fonts from dafont.com to help spiffy up the look of the text. I ended up using "Scriptina" (headings on each fin), "Heather" (sub-headings), "Felix Titling" (names), and "Monotype Corsiva" (a standard font in Word that was used for all other text). You can see in the images where each font was used, as well.

The cardstock the fans were printed on was 107# metallic sky blue cardstock from www.paperandmore.com. This site had great selection, quality, prices, and shipped extremely quickly. My orders typically arrived within 48 hours of placing the order.

All of the printing was done at a local print shop for approximately $0.05 for black and white copies, and $0.20 color copies. For 100 fan programs, 300 sheets of carstock were needed as there were 6 fins per fan and 2 fins per page.

Finding a dye to cut the fans prooved to be challenge, so all 600 fins were hand-cut with loving care and attention by myself and my maid of honor. After putting each fan of 6 fins in order, we hole-punched the bottom and slid in a ribbon and eyelet to hold the fins together while still allowing them to flip and spin for both reading and practical purposes.

While the project was time consuming, it was extremely fun and certainly saved money from having fan programs designed, printed, and asssembled all professionally. The total cost (including professional printing) amount to $1.02 each (cardstock, printing, eyelets, ribbon, scissors, etc). I would recommend this project to a very patient bride having an outdoor wedding in warmer weather or climates. Happy planning!