Weddingbee Blog

One of my favorite wedding projects also turned out to be one of the most time consuming tasks that I took on for the wedding. The Facebook. As I mentioned earlier, it’s not like Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook (though that did come in handy to find many of our guests’ photos for our wedding version). No, it’s like those college facebooks that we got our freshman year that had all of the first year class’  names and pictures and you used it to try to predict what your roommate would be like, who your friends might be and what guys you wanted to meet (what, I was the only one who did that?).

As much as a pain in the a** that this project was, I’m SO happy that I stuck with it and finished it. Everyone loved it and so many people said it was one of their favorite additions to our wedding.

I don’t really have any sort of tutorial because I’m pretty sure I made this project way harder than it needed to be. And I’m confident that if you want to make this yourselves, you’ll probably think of a much easier way. Basically what I did was create 10 rectangles on a page in Word, inserted a guest’s picture and added in a fun fact/conversation starter about each person (and which lodge they were staying in if they stayed at IslandWood). And then repeated that approximately 14 times for all of our guests. Then we printed the pages and had them cut in half at our local Fed Ex store.

It looks even better without all the blacked out information. I promise.

The pain in the butt part was when I had to figure out exactly how each page needed to be set up so that it could be printed and cut in half and would then line up correctly when I went to put it all together. Because this was very hard for my brain to figure out at the time, I ended up having to (multiple times, mind you) print out the pages, cut them up and then rearrange everything in the Word file after I finally figured out how the pages needed to be ordered. I do not recommend this process. I’m sure there is an easier way. I just never found it. Oh, and the other pain in the butt part of this endeavor was finding, resizing and cropping all of the pictures, as well as trying to think of conversation starters. Way more time consuming to do this for 134 guests than I thought it would be!

The last page of our Facebook—even though Cody couldn’t be there physically, we made sure he was there in spirit! Also Annemarie was our amazing officiant. I will be talking a lot more about her in future posts because she was absolutely wonderful. And of course you recognize our awesome photographers!

Once the pages were printed I took everything over to my parents’ house where it was a group effort to get them bound. I printed the covers on the same poison ivory cover weight paper that I used for our invitations, Mr. EB cut in half the covers, the backs (a plain piece of cardstock) and the last page that I had forgotten to have printed at Fed Ex. Then we assembled all the pages, I punched holes in the books and my mom tied blue and green ribbon through the holes to keep everything together.

And they were done! We handed out most of the Facebooks on Friday night and Saturday as people checked in, and then we put the rest of them near the programs before the ceremony (at least this was the plan…). But some of my family came in earlier in the week so we made sure to have several of the Facebooks around so that we could show them to people during the bridesmaid luncheon and at my parents’ house where people gathered before the welcome dinner on Friday night.

This was definitely a labor of love, and if I wasn’t convinced that the finished project was really going to be worth it, I’m not sure I would have kept going. I’m so, so glad that I did, though, and everyone’s comments about how much they loved the book have meant so much to me. Plus, it’s one more tangible representation of everyone who was at our wedding.

Mrs. Eggs Benedict tip #1: If there’s any project on your DIY list that is giving you fits, focus on whether it has any sentimental value to you or your partner, and what it will mean to you on your wedding day to have it (or not). If it means a lot to you, keep going! Otherwise, I say focus on other projects that will mean more to you. I ended up sacrificing several other projects due to the time I invested in this one, and I have to say it was so worth it.