One tradition that hasn’t gone away is the guest book to have your guests sign as they attend your wedding. However, guest books are evolving. There are so many different ways to make your guest book personal to you! We’ve recently been seeing our guests become super creative with their guest books, and we love to share these ideas!
Jeremy Russell Photography, High Land Brewery
Kim and Trevor got married in Asheville, NC this past July. One of Trevor’s groomsmen created this guest book for them, and had the guests sign it in pencil. After the wedding, he went home and burned all the well wishes, congratulations, and signatures into the wood, and now they have a permanent work of art (with huge sentimental value!) to have in their home! It is a perfect idea, and fits them so well.
Angela Tucker Photography, The Kimpton Hotel, After the Tone
A really cool guest book trend that is going around right now is called “After the Tone”. This replaces the traditional signed guestbook, where here the guests can pick the phone up and leave a voice recording for the couple. You can imagine how fun these messages get as the night goes on! After the wedding, you send the phone back to the company and they send you a disc with the recordings back to keep forever! This is really cool because you’ll get to hear your guests voices when you re-listen to it.
Tori Waegele Photography, The Dairy Barn
This stunner of a guest book right here is a perfect example of a coffee table guest book. I call guest books a coffee table guest book when it looks like something that can be kept out as decor in your house. I love the idea of this because you can just pick it up and look at what your guests wrote, instead of keeping it in storage somewhere and reading it every couple of years. This guest book was also really beautiful because it included photos of the couple, not just blank pages to sign.
There are so many nontraditional ways to incorporate the traditional guest book. We love when our clients take the idea and run with it to have something super personal to them. We even had one couple use a guitar as their guestbook, and it was a huge hit. When deciding on what you want to use for your wedding, decide if it’s something important to you, and if it is, do you want to be able to listen to it, see it as decor in your house, or have it as a piece of art? There is never a wrong choice, just have fun with it!