Guest Book

The last bit of DIY I did was to amend our guest book. We got the book from my mum and dad for Christmas. It came with a box to keep it in and they also ordered a metal tag with our names and wedding date to put on the front of it.

We already knew that we wanted to make sure space would be left in the book for us to stick the Polaroid Pogo prints of all of our guests. I also didn't want to just leave the book plain inside as I felt that everyone just writes the same things and I thought it would be good to give them some pointers of what to write.

I came up with 5 questions as follows {most of which I got from other bloggers ideas & the guestbook store books}:

Name(s)

How do you know the Bride & Groom?

Where did you travel from?

Any advice for the Newlyweds?

Your Special Wishes for Us

I got the 5 questions made into a clear stamp from The English Stamp Company as they could create anything you wanted and they could do it in the same text that I had used for all of the other stationery. The stamp came really quickly but in the mean time I cut out rectangles of grey paper {the same as we used to cover the table plan board} that would be stuck into the book for the photos.

I got some VersaFine black ink to use for the stamp and after a few trial runs I had managed to get them all to look OK. I stamped the questions to the left of the grey paper so we could see the guests messages beside their photos. I put 2 on each page of the guestbook which worked out well for the size of the pages.

To complete the book I added another square to the first page with our names and wedding date on. The book had a sequined gold ribbon decoration on the front so I also added a strip of purple & a strip of thin grey ribbon to tie it in with the colours. This was the only thing I was still making the week before the wedding as everything else was complete.

Our ushers did a fabulous job of getting most of our guests to fill in the book. Jake went round each table with the book & pens while Murray took photos of all the guests. We didn't bother taking the Pogo printer to the wedding so the book was just full of all of the messages.

I think that Georgia, our flowergirl {although she preferred to be called a bridesmaid}, wrote the best message, as her advice was 'Always listen to Gaynor'.

I printed out all of the photos and stuck them in the book when we got back from our honeymoon so now each page looks like the image below, which is my parents!

We have a couple of messages without photos and vice versa so I'm going to ask those guests either for a photo of them at the wedding, or to fill in the blanks via email and I will write it in the book. I am really glad I took the time to personalise the guest book and we have some lovely messages to look back on, with a good mixture of serious and funny, and only a couple of really silly ones!