Wedding Wednesday - part 5

Guestbook and Hellos ...(other wedding related posts here)

So these were the two projects that didn't quite go to plan - but turned out great anyways ... firstly, the wedding photo-guestbook.

*Above: Our friends who got married 6 weeks after us :)

Hugely inspired by all the photo-guestbooks on pretty much every wedding related website/blog that's out there. We set out to make our own. Sunshine, his dad, and the man-of-honour got together and via some trial and error fashioned a frame from bamboo poles taped together and stuck into two concrete pots that usually hold garden umbrellas. The large piece of floral fabric was originally bought as possible bunting fabric. I also made up a little chalkboard speech bubble using some thin plywood cut to shape; then painted with chalkboard paint on both sides. Add to that some chunky chalk; and a picnic basket full of random hats, leis, feather boas and other props; and there you have a great photo-guestbook set up. We got the bestman's digital camera set up on a tripod, and set it to auto ... and left the whole set-up in the garden ...

All our hopes of people spending time in the garden were unfortunately thwarted as it was quite a gray day, and most people spent most of their time in the marquee - this meant that not a lot of people discovered the photobooth (although we did try to get the word out), and so we only have about 30 pictures ... BUT they are some of the fabbest pictures of the wedding yet! See the full set of photos here.

The other thing I did was make up lots of "Hello, my name is..." tags for everyone. Sunshine and I know lots of lovely people, but they don't all necessarily know each other. I had hoped to make these up; written guests' names on myself; and maybe added a bit of "... ask me about ___" as a conversation starter; and added their table assignment on the back. But due to the last minute-ness of lots of things ... that never happened. Still, I didn't want them to be wasted - so I left a basket full of them with a sharpie by the entrance to the marquee. And not surprisingly, people found them and wrote their names on! Some did a more than just write their names though ;)

I didn't like the standard stickers you could buy, so made them up smaller and in a font that I liked and printed out sheets of them. I also bought packs of rectangular badges which I stuck to the back of my printouts with some spray adhesive. Then it was quite easy to cut individual badges out.

By the way, Burning Dan was our official photographer - he's not a wedding photographer, but he's a friend who's very good at getting reactions out of people, and we have some stunning shots of the wedding guests from him (that we are still working through ...) - that will be another future post ...

Next week - my favourite craft project of the wedding!