A Labor of Love in Translation

Mr. Canary and I were so grateful for a three day weekend to finish up on some wedding projects. We were so engrossed, we didn't even go out to see the fireworks (plus the weather was bad so more incentive for staying in!) This year, peace of mind trumped patriotism.

Instead, we completed one of our biggest projects-- our programs. This really was a labor of love. Considering that we hadn't done many DIY items for the wedding, this task seemed really arduous!

Mr. Canary assembling the pages of our program.

One of the requirements for the program was that it had to be bilingual. I have been to one too many Chinese weddings where wedding guests chatted loudly throughout the entire ceremony because they had no idea what was going on and mostly because they didn't understand the language or the rites. I am determined to prevent this from happening during our ceremony or I will personally eject the person from the room... white dress and all! So to try to garner more interest from the Chinese guests, we decided to translate the entire ceremony in the program (readings included) so that they could follow along.

We ordered most of our paper from French Paper. The quality is great and the prices are very good for bulk paper. We selected Mod-Tone Blush for the cover (which was also used as one of the papers in our invitation suite) and Pop-Tone Pink Lemonade for the inside pages. We ordered Stardream Gold Text paper for the cover embellishment from Paper Presentation, which seems to have better pricing (just by a little, but helps in the long run if you are buying bulk) than Paper Source.

My inspiration for the programs was this image from The Knot.


I loved the contrast stitching on the left, but after a few trial runs with Mama Canary... it just wasn't working out. Like Miss Creampuff, our needle would get stuck or break. I didn't want to subject Mama Canary to the torture of having to sew 170 programs and then deal with troubleshooting the machine every 10 seconds so we decide to forgo the cool binding and just use two staples from an extra long stapler (a la Mrs. Toucan). But we did keep the contrast strip of cover embellishment.

After printing all our pages on our trusty Epson RX680 (which I absolutely adore because it did not jam once and unlike other printers, I could replace single ink cartridges, which were about $13 each instead of buying a whole set of cartridges). And down to the wire, we started the assembly.

From the front, the program in English.

From the back, the program in Chinese.

The pages meet in the middle with the left side in English and the right side in Chinese.

The finished products all tucked into a box I found at the Crate and Barrel summer sale for $6.95 and that I embellished with some left over ribbon to give it a pop.


What do you think? Have any of you produced bi-lingual or multilingual wedding items for the benefit of your guests?