Weddingbee Blog

For our actual wedding, in June, we aren’t going to have a traditional guestbook because that wedding tradition is going to be overridden by a family tradition - everyone who gets married at the family house where we’re getting married has guests sign the house guestbook (we write the names of the couple & the date at the top of a new page). I am thrilled about this, because we have 2 house guestbooks going back to the 1800’s, and they list all the guests at a bunch of my different family members’ weddings - including my parents, brother and sister-in-law, and grandparents!

But…part of me still wants to have “our” guestbook that we can personalize, and then take home with us.

Enter - our Chinese banquet!

It’s going to be held exactly four weeks after the wedding, and I was thinking we would just buy a pretty (but standard) guestbook along these lines:

[from China Bridal]

But then when I saw Mrs. OBX’s knottie bio that Mrs. BoP linked to this morning - it just clicked! I had seen guestbooks made from engagement photos before and always liked the idea, but we didn’t have professional engagement shots taken, and it seemed a little random to just use snapshots of us over the years, so I just dropped the idea. But Mrs. OBX used pictures from the Outer Banks, where her wedding took place, and I realized the photo book idea works just as well with ANY kind of pictures you want! (Yes, that might seem obvious, but just hadn’t occurred to me for some reason! :-P)

So our new plan (if there’s enough time in between?) is to get a photobook made up ASAP after the wedding so we can have a guestbook made of our actual wedding pictures!!! Some of our banquet guests will have been to the wedding, but they’ll still want to see pictures, right? And then a number of banquet guests won’t have gone, so it will be a good way to include them in the actual ceremony as well!

Does anyone know the turnaround time for photobooks? My photographer said she usually gets her pictures (all digital) to clients within a week of the wedding, and this won’t be our real wedding album, so we should be able to select a few photos to slap into the guestbook without toooo much deliberation!