frugal friday: wedding programs

this is officially my first "frugal living" post! i wrote an introduction here explaining why its so fun for me to save money as well as how it benefits me and my husband!

i was always trying to save money during my 13.5 months of wedding planning. here is one big way i saved-we made our own wedding programs. we also did part of our invitations the same way, but as these were entirely hand-crafted, i thought this was a better example.

we used:

• about 300 sheets of printing paper-this paper was thicker then regular multi-purpose or copy paper, making it a little more durable during the process
• a cheap dark tea (in bags)
• ink. we had to replace my friend leah's printer cartridges only once
• elbow grease-it took a lot of work and i had brown hands for about a week, but it was totally worth it

this is about the color we were looking for, we were constantly boiling fresh batches

we poured the tea into these trays so that we could soak the paper more easily
we soaked each sheet for about a minute
oh yeah, note the design already printed on the paper.
we pre-printed a pretty design on the paper, and it faded as it got wet and baked-
it had a really cool effect!

after soaking the paper, we baked the paper for another minute at around 250 degrees

then we dried out the paper on towels

then we ironed for a flatter sheet of paper.
(this was mostly so we could run the sheets through the printer)

running the paper through the printer was probably the hardest part of the whole process. we made sure the paper was lined up correctly and that the paper didn't catch on the inside.

these are the programs before they are cut and tyed together.