When we were deciding on a guest book for our wedding, we (again) steered away from tradition. There are a couple of things I don’t love about the traditional guestbook meant for a single event: they tend to be put away after the day and either never or extremely rarely looked at again, and the book often is left with notes on only the first few pages.  It’s always a little disappointing to me that after all of the guests have signed the book, an overwhelming majority of the pages are left blank—it seems like a waste.

We based our guest book design on an exhibit we saw at the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibit was made up of a clear box filled with pieces of paper on which people had written notes (I think describing secrets they were keeping—versions of this project have been done in many forms). Ours wouldn’t be an art piece, but we liked the idea of a guest book made of individual pieces of cardstock on which guests could write their names and a small note—a wish for us, advice, or anything that they thought.

We found a simple square, glass vase to use as our container, and decided on several colors of cardstock for the tags. We did end up making our cardstock pieces into tags—they were more visually interesting and fun than plain cardstock squares and were really not difficult to make.

We made our own tags so that we could choose the color of the paper; using premade tags limits color choice severely. Our wedding colors ended up being kraft brown (think paper grocery bag), celery green, and periwinkle blue—I still love the combination—especially with the brown, which ended up being an accidental wedding color, really. We didn’t start out thinking about brown, but it ended up in our invitations, and then kept being the perfect accent color. To the guestbook tags, we added some shades of white and cream to balance all of the color.

To make the tags, we used 12” x 12” cardstock and cut it into 2” x 4” pieces, trimmed two of the corners, and added a silver eyelet and a small piece of coordinating ribbon. All of the supplies cost us about $10, which is much less expensive than a nice traditional guestbook. The vase we chose was also about $10 and can be repurposed if we ever decide to store the tags away.

Our vase with the tags is currently sitting on our mantle. Every few weeks, we walk over and pull a few tags out to read—extending the fun. I love the way this format encouraged friends and family to have fun with their notes. Reading them makes us smile, sometimes laugh, and often feel a bit sentimental. We have a few tags from some of the younger guests with names written in by parents and pictures or scribbles on the other side. Taking the formality out of the guestbook gave our guests permission to have fun with their comments, and we are so happy with our decision.

We’ve even discussed replacing the guestbook in our spare room with a similar idea. If you’ve got an event coming up—even a birthday party or baby shower—you might think about making some simple package tags and putting out a shallow vase or basket with a few pens. I’m now wishing we’d thought to put a different color of tags out at our showers to remember those events in a similar way.
 

photo by: B.K. Adams

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