Wedding coasters

photo by Emma Case

Or programmes as I liked to call them.  Turns out lots of people think they are coasters or seat markers on first sight.  Including my own Mother who as a result didn't turn them over to see the special message we'd included for our parents and so wasn't a sobbing mess before the ceremony started like some of guests.  I like to think this is down to my ingenious design but it may just be because they do look a lot like beer mats!

Prompted by yet more proof (via A Practical Wedding!!) that no-one thinks these are programmes I thought I'd better explain how they worked and how I made them.

Basically I wanted something cute and nifty that would fit in people's bags and I stumbled upon the idea of a map fold.  So using these instructions for a turkish map fold I type up our two readings and the programme for the ceremony and folded them all up.

For the cover, I wanted to keep to the simple gill sans font I'd used for everything else so just had our name, location and date on it.  For the back, I had spotted this dedication ages ago on 100 layer cake and loved it so I knew that's what would go there.

I stuck them all together and left wee piles of them under books for a day to g and that was that.  Programmes done, I was really pleased with them - definitely one of my favourite wedding diys.

Blurb books*

Since getting our wedding photographs from Emma I've created several blurb books with the disc of images.  A wedding album for each set of parents, a book of just the photobooth pictures and finally last month I finished off our 160 page beast of a wedding album.

Our wedding albums

I'm glad I took so long to get this done as by the time I got round to ordering it from blurb they had started doing a proline version of their books with nice linen backed covers and higher quality paper.

The proline books are all printed in Seattle so I thought it would take ages to arrive but ours came within a week of me placing the order which is pretty speedy.

parcel arrived and sitting on my desk at work

So I ordered the largest landscape size (33x28 cm) in hardback with the oatmeal linen cover which is quite a large weave and a nice texture to it.  This comes with a slip cover.

Slip cover and linen hardcover

 I'm really pleased with the book and the quality of printing and I think the colours of Emma's photographs come out really well whether b&w or colour.

Example pages

 The other good thing about this version of blurb is that you can do big double page spreads, which I love!

Example double page spread

and another one

I love having a wee photobooth one too and its amazing what you notice when you're looking at the pictures printed out rather than just on your screen.

Pages from the photobooth book

The cost of the big book was £92 but I found a discount code for 15% so it was £79 which I think is pretty good for 160 pages of photos.

*Sorry about the crap photo pictures (you can click to enlarge the fuzziness) and this is not a sponsored post I just love the blurb.

Weekend diy

Spotted this on brightbazaar today:

[image from here]

And in under an hour have created this in our spare room using a map of Mull and the West Coast:

Sometimes when I say 'I could make that' it turns out I really can!

6 months...

...goes surprisingly quickly.   Its our 6 month anniversary today; we shall be quietly celebrating and hopefully putting the finishing touches to our blurb book over the weekend.

{photo by Emma Case}

Blogging

Hey, remember when I blogged fairly regularly about my wedding?? Me too, I'm delighted to be back on the wagon again for a short to guest blog for the lovely Marty at Not The Marrying Kind today about putting our photobooth together. Go read it if you want some info on how I made giant photo props of my cat's head like so:

I do intend to post again at least to sum up the wedding experience and showcase my diy adventures but that would require digging stuff out of the various large plastic boxes hidden in our spare room and taking some pictures.

In the meantime, I do tumble as Marty says, I realise I should probably pinterest with all the hip kids but I've a fond spot for tumblr as it got me through wedding planning and dress designing.

Wedding Video

So the final piece of wedding paraphernalia is our wedding video. Created using an ebay bargain super 8 camera bought for a tenner which was a gamble that paid off and a bloggie HD camera manned by either of our brothers.

This has been eating up my evenings and while not anyway as professional as some of the offerings on vimeo its just right for us and just enough wedding video to be watching.

Kiara + John Wedding from Kiara King on Vimeo.

Animate

Because I love, love, love Harry Potter stylee photos:

Gif animator