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Now that we have a bajillion engagement photos we’ve been trying to figure out what the heck to do with them. You already saw our save the dates, but I have a few other tricks up my sleeve for these photos.
Meet our combo engagement album and…guestbook!
Since my thoughts for the wedding have been coming together, I’ve been trying to spend a little less time on the wedding/events board of Pinterest. It’s so hard, though, because there are just sooo many amazing ideas. I’d say about 50% of my wedding-planning designs originated from this site. It. is. incredible.
Recently, I’ve been trying to pick out a guestbook idea. Simple enough, right? Not with Pinterest. There are so many ideas! I really want the guestbook to be something that we can display and reflect upon in our home far after the wedding, so I’m putting a good deal of thought into this. Some ideas:
A fabulous new idea is the guestbook puzzle, where you have guests sign their names/ write well wishes on something that you can have fun doing with your new love for the rest of your life!! This is just so sweet.
Image via Etsy by Bella Puzzles Too
Lately I have been pretty bad in regards to projects. I tend to have an enormous amount of ideas running through my head that I have a hard time focusing on just one. This results in various semi-completed projects. I have made it my goal to finish up my old projects before I move on to new ones. (We’ll see how long this lasts.)
Example A: our wishing tree that I wrote about three months ago. I had brought up the idea of adding LED lights to the vase, and you all agreed that would add some pizzazz. Fast forward three months, and I still have not added any lights. Honestly, I kind of forgot about it.
While I was at Party City this past weekend with my mom, I walked past a small box of LED string lights. The wishing tree flashed through my mind and so I bought this box of $4 lights.
{Image via Party City}
I almost did not buy them because I wasn’t sure how this was all going to work. Would the string and the bulbs show through the beads? Would the beads block the lights? The logistics didn’t seem to be in my favor, but I figured for $4 it was worth a shot.
Back in October, I was furiously collecting inspiration for all of the little wedding details that would turn “Our Day” into “Our Special Day.” One of those details was the guest book. I always assumed we’d have a nontraditional guest book because I read so much Weddingbee/Martha Stewart and go on Pinterest so much, and I had seen so many cute ideas for interactive guest books. I love the idea of getting guests to write us little messages, which is why we’ll definitely be doing Mad Libs style RSVP cards (sound good, Mr. Unicycle?).
Image via The Knot / Photo by Jenna Walker Photography
And I’m hoping to make speech bubble props for our photo booth, a la Ms. Ferris Wheel so guests can leave us a message there too.
Read more…
Featured on Weddingbee
All-Inclusion Invitation Suites
“Make an elegant invitation statement without the fuss. Stylish invitation sets with matching envelopes, reception and response cards included.”
Growing up, my grandpa had this awesome Polaroid camera that he would use to take photos with whenever he though something was photo-worthy. He was an artist and a designer and always was always finding new ways to express himself. I guess something about the instant satisfaction of a Polaroid camera got to him because I remember getting notes from him in the mail filled with photos. He would always write a description of the photo and the year in that little space white space below the film. He always dated his photos.
Well, one day I was wasting time on Pinterest (as I so often do) when this image caught my eye.
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| Image via PetaPixel / Photo by LoveIsABigDeal |
Since I confessed my love for photography, it should hardly come as a surprise that having a photographer and second shooter at our wedding was just not going to be enough. I wanted to incorporate other ways to photograph our guests having fun.
Attending my cousin’s wedding about a year and a half ago, I discovered the wonder of the photo booth. They had fun props like boas, funny glasses, hats… Now I know this is nothing new to the wedding world, but since it was the first wedding I was able to attend as an adult, I just thought it was the coolest thing since sliced bread! And as a twist from the guestbook norm, they had a table set up with scrapbooking pages, stickers, and markers so that guests could make their own page and offer well wishes and advice to the couple.
Image via My Daily Wedding Deals / Photo by Circle City Photobooth
Pretty much as soon as we started planning I kept mentioning the photo-booth idea to Mr. Hawk. Having never been to a wedding featuring one, he couldn’t quite grasp my enthusiasm. It wasn’t too difficult to finally get him on board. (I’m sure my incessant gushing had nothing to do with it.) But we were still unsure that it was in the cards due to budget constraints with our reception venue. Well, remember how I told you that booking Legacy Hall really opened up some wiggle room in the budget? Well, HELLO PHOTO BOOTH!
Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
We didn’t want a traditional guest book. If we wanted a list of everyone’s names and numbers, I’d compile it all myself. Oh wait, I did. It’s called our guest list.
That being said, we did want some sort of memento for ourselves that would be a record of the guests who were there. Something other than our RSVP list, that is. There are some great ideas out there.
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| Image via Give a Caricature / Having a caricature picture for them to sign would be great if we had any history with caricatures. |
I would like to give a fair warning out to brides nearing their wedding day. It’s easy to put things off and plan to do them later. I think some of us assume that if it comes down to it and we run out of time, we can always throw money at the problem and let someone else do things for us.
I am here to tell you that I recently learned a difficult lesson…
Attempting to throw money at a problem does not always work!
I had originally planned to design guest book pages myself, then print them out and leave them on a table with place cards for people to fill out. However, I have been unable to replicate the awesomeness that others have created. After enough failed attempts, I started avoiding guest books in general.
Image via Weddingbee / Posted by michellybelly124
Honestly, I think I avoided working on a guest book for so long that I actually just forgot about it…
Read more…
I love flea markets. OK, that is a little bit of a lie. Not the love part, but my usage of the plural form of market is not entirely appropriate. You see, I have only ever been to one flea market—although I have been multiple times! Back in high school, Bridesmaid M and I had many thrift shopping adventures and I am a HUGE fan of searching for hidden treasures at antique malls, so I always figured the flea market would be right up my alley. Despite all of this, I never actually made it to the monthly Nashville flea market until I got engaged.
I knew the flea market would be the perfect place to hunt for unique decor items, so I figured out the dates and marked them in my Google calendar (because, quite honestly, if it is not in that calendar then it does not get done). As I anxiously waited for my first flea market weekend to roll around, I thought about what might be a good purchase to make. I knew I should not go in with a strict list. It was a flea market after all, I wasn’t grocery shopping. I also knew that if I did not have some ideas then I would either come home empty handed due to “I like it but I don’t know if I’ll use it” syndrome or with an entire car-full of items due to “I’m sure I can find a spot for this!” syndrome.
One item that seemed to have high flea market find potential was something cool and unique to use for our card box.
Read more…
Image via TheBestPictureProject
Something special is headed my way! While I’ll leave the wining and dining to seemingly possessed dinnerware (or at least the caterer), someone had to make a guest book.
I tried the new customized pathway through Shutterfly and it worked wonderfully! I have always been happy with projects I’ve ordered through them, and I do not expect this one to be any different. Only having to pay shipping through a special offer was the best part.
I know what you are thinking. Oh, how embarrassing—poor Miss Doe has a typo in her title. Right?
Wrong. I deliberately put that question mark there because I never intended for there to be a part three. I am actually quite surprised I am writing a part three for these wish tags, but I am so glad I am. Remember how I ended my last post with wanting to tweak the color palette of the wish tags? I ran out to Michaels, again, last night to find some new supplies that would add some color to this project. By the way, I asked Mr. Buck what his guess is as to how many times I will go to Michaels before the wedding. His guess? Seventy-seven times. That seems somewhat high and dramatic, but I guess we will see when it is all said and done.
Well, I kind of did more than just tweak the color palette. More like completely change the entire thing. I thought that I should use our colors for the wedding. If I use sage-colored tags with light pink embossing, then maybe the wish tags would look like little leaves on the tree. I ended up buying large squares of card stock and then cutting them down into 4″ x 6″ squares. This was much cheaper than using the pre-cut tags, and I was able to make them bigger to give our guests more room for writing.
I think I might have an addiction—to embossing, that is. I recently taught myself how to emboss, and now I want to emboss everything in my house because it is so dang fun. I wonder how Mr. Buck would react if I embossed his fishing license? Yeeeah, probably shouldn’t go there.
Now that we have the wish tags printed we can begin embossing the other side of the tags.
1. I was really hoping that I could find sparkly black embossing powder. Unfortunately, I could not find any, so I opted to buy black and sparkly embossing powder separately. I then mixed them together to obtain the look I was trying to achieve.
With the majority of the ceremony planning behind me, I suppose it’s time to start showing you all the things Mr. D and I have started to work on for the reception. There was one project in particular that I started on shortly after we got engaged because I simply could not wait any longer to do it. That, my friends, would be the guestbook. There are so many clever ideas out there for personalized guestbooks. I wanted to make sure that we had a guestbook that would capture our day in a way that we would remember forever. I wanted to give our guests a chance to say something meaningful and do it in a fun way. Which is why, when I saw these bad boys, I knew I had to have them:
Image via Guestbook Store
Our guests rock, we want to rock with them, and we will be rockin’ in each others’ arms all.night.long. How do we plan on remembering just who celebrated with us ten, twenty, and fifty years from now? In case you didn’t catch all my cheesy hints…we are having a rock guest book!
I think this idea actually spurred from a picture I saw early on of signed seashells, but then I came across this picture and I was sold:
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| Image via Polka Dot Bride/Photo by Ira Lippke Studios |
We’ve been collecting little stones for the last year, and my favorite part is that Best Man Cruise has taken this wedding project so seriously.
Read more…
From the very beginning this has been our wedding. We’ve included lots of elements that are strictly us and I’m very fortunate in that mommy Macarons has been on board with just about everything. What’s the one point of tension?
Image via TheWeddingOutlet
Macs and I aren’t exactly fans, I loathe them in fact. I always feel under pressure to write something amazing and it’s only made worse because I know other guests can read what I’ve written. Since a guest book is meant to serve as a reminder of those that celebrated with you, why not have something with a little more presence?
Read more…
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