From current.com

We are getting married in a traditional Italian Catholic wedding ceremony. Although, I was raised protestant, to be married in a church in Italy, I had to go through the hoops to have a Catholic wedding. It was one of the most intense procedures I have had to endure throughout our engagement – marriage classes, meetings with the priest in NYC, mailings back and forth with the Archdiocese in Italy, etc. I am excited that we have finished everything, though, and we have the blessing to be married in the small church in the village of Artimino, in Tuscany.

Artimino Church from paulcrossart.com

It is a nice touch to have a booklet for your guests for the ceremony. It gives them a reference point, introduces them to the wedding party, and helps them know when they need to chime in as witnesses. For our wedding, the booklet is 100% necessary! Half of the church will be American and half will be Italian – and not everyone speaks both languages. Yes, this is yet another hurdle in a bicultural wedding.

wedding booklet from flickr.com

The solution – find a priest who speaks both languages, split up the ceremony in both English and Italian, and prepare a booklet with everything in both languages. This way, all of our guests can read along on their own language to know what is happening. We are making the booklet with the left pages in English and the right pages in Italian so that everything mirrors and no one gets lost.

bilingual from daytonchinese.org

A typical wedding booklet is less than half the number of pages of ours, but we need to include every piece of the ceremony to help people feel connected and involved even if the priest isn’t speaking their language at that point. We want all of our guests to know what is being said. So, our booklet is 28 pages – including cover and back.

I don’t want to spend a fortune on these booklets, so I have designed them myself using Adobe InDesign. It is a great program that allows you to build a booklet with leaves and pages – a leave is the actual paper that is folded in half to make four pages front and back. I hope I’m not getting too technical, but I think this is one DIY project that is worth it. I bought ivory paper from Jam Paper in NYC, and I am working with the same printer who I used to make my invitations – a contact from work. I am using simple dark navy ink to go along with our colors, and I plan on tying the same navy twine on the binding to match our olive oil jar favors and our invitations. Simple and sweet.

From timeout.com

I am currently going through the trial and error of how to lay out the pages so that the leaves print correctly, but I know that I will conquer this hurdle just the way I have conquered every other DYI project I have taken on.