The wedding program with a built-in pocket for confetti (or favours!)

I wanted a cheap one-sheet wedding program that I could print myself, and a non-messy way for the maple leaf ash seeds (helicopter seeds) to be both distributed and contained during the ceremony. I couldn't find any straight-forward ways of doing it by Googling, so I wasted a couple of hours folding paper and found the solution! Behold! The finished product — our easy pocket programs.

Here's how you can pull this off…

What you will need:

• A4 paper
• Printing or photocopying equipment, or the ability to write many many copies
• Something to put in the pockets (confetti, seeds, wedding favors…)

So the first thing you need to do is to design your program. There are two sides:

Side One is the side I put the wedding party and ceremony order of service info on, and this sheet uses one half of the A4 sheet for writing on (the other half will be inside the pocket). You could do this by formatting the margins in Word to only type on the top half of the paper (what I did) or just fold the piece of paper in half and write away to photocopy later. (Afterthought: you could probably write something cool here for after the confetti is thrown.)

Side Two is divided into four sections:

• the cover of the program (The bit with O&S on it)
• the back of the program (with the info about our venue),
• and two spare spots on the pocket (I put our logo on one and explained what the seeds were for on the other).

I formatted it in Word to have the four sections by having the margins set to .5cm on all sides, orientation as landscape and a table with 1 row 4 columns. There is an option for text direction under “Table Tools,” under the “Layout” tab, Once again you could just divide it into sections and draw on it.

IMPORTANT: Everything has to be the right way up except for the back part (about the venue).

Once you have your two sides, it is time to print or copy them all out. The main thing here is to make sure that the printed top half of Side One is on the back of the cover and back parts of Side Two, and the two spare spots have no writing on the back of them. Once you have fiddled around with it, and printed it off so it is double-sided and all in the right spots you can fold them.

First, with Side One up, fold in half and unfold, to give a nice centre line.

Then fold the bottom part up to the halfway line.

Then you fold the corners of the bottom part like this.

Now unfold the bottom part and push each side's corners inside out.

Then fold the top part in half to meet the top of the pocket.

Then open it up and fold the pocket part up so that the cover section comes down over the top.

And it's done!