I am seeing some hugely creative ideas on the internet for guest book ideas, from vintage typewriters set up on tables, so let's hope all your guests will type out a personal message and hopefully despite their drunken haze be able to hang this from a beautifully decorated wishing tree or be able to assemble scrabble pieces in a cohesive form :)
I of course love all these ideas as they are hugely creative, but let's be honest, they are not practical from a European wedding point of view.
Let's face it most of your guests by the time they are presented with a guestbook to sign would have downed the best part of a bottle of champagne or sangria and will not have any co-ordination to test their keyboard skills on an old typewriter or delicately hang perfectly formed cards on a tree.
A destination wedding as well also poses the problem of getting everything home. It is all very well to make up a park bench and have your guests write on it and put it in your garden, but if you are getting married in Spain or Italy it is going to cost you a fortune to get this creative artifact to your homeland.
Having been working on this idea with some of our brides for our weddings this year, by far the better options are to have a photo or video booth, this can be set up for you here in Spain by our wonderful Becky Sharpe, she created an amazing video booth last year for a wedding here.
Or to have a wishing well such as a birdcage where guests can post their messages into this (hopefully!) and you can take them home and mount them into your wedding guest book, a normal shop bought guest book just set out or another lovely idea I have suggested this year for our brides is to go onto a site such as Blurb and create your own personalised guestbook.
This is a fabulous idea, and if you take a look at the Blurb site, for example, you can create and design you own book.
Upload photos of you and H2B, some fabulous photos of the country and venue you are marrying in, in our case Andalucia, perhaps photos of your guests as well could be fun and leave blank pages for them to leave their messages.
You can also add in questions for them to answer such as, where do you see us in 25 years time, any tips for a happy marriage, etc and see what messages and replies you get!
I love this idea as it is creating something truly unique for your wedding day and such fun to look at afterwards, you could even follow this book up with another one about your honeymoon and the first year of married life, a sequel!
This is also an easy option to get everything home and to be practical, as much as us creative divas love to think we will create a fabulous scrapbook after the wedding, there are many of us that will become bogged down with work and back to a 'normal' life and this will take a back seat and may never get done.
By creating this personalised book with photos and fun questions plus the guests comments it is already done and dusted will save more time and effort when the honeymoon period is over and normality returrns.
You will have a wonderfully personalised guest book on your coffee table without any effort on your part apart from having created it in your wedding excitement and another lovely part of building up to the day!
I have certainly got some of my brides thinking about this idea which is very simple and not expensive and yet fun to do so I hope I have given you some inspiration too for your wedding day by creating your own personalised guest book idea.
