Be Our Guest!

This is kind of random but I was thinking about guestbooks.  I love the idea of recording who was actually in attendance at our wedding but the traditional guest book full of signatures is, well, IMHO, kinda boring.  Once the wedding is over, you put it in a box in the closet and forget about it.  Lame!

Cruising around the web, I saw some nifty ideas for more interesting, creative and inventive guest options.

Go name free!  Check out this piece of artwork I found at Paper Garland, where the couple asked their guests for a thumbprint.  It's adorable.  I could see this kind of thing hanging on a wall in my house forever.  It even has a little bit of Disney flair in that it reminds me of Carl and Ellie Fredriksen from one of our favorite movies, Pixar's Up! 

I've also seen the thumbprint thing done as leaves on a tree.  Cute, but not Disney-fied enough.

It's unique but you don't know which thumbprint belongs to which guest.  It's a teeny tiny drawback.  I wonder if we'll have enough guests to make this really work for us?   I love the idea though! This one is a frontrunner!

What about something less arty and more personal?  Some clever, game-loving couple came up with the idea of a Jenga guest book.  I found this at Oh Lovely Day (an amazing wedding blog packed with DIY ideas) and she found it on photographer Jennifer Roper's webpage. It would be interesting to see how this would work with my favorite board game, Scrabble.  How tiny would you have to write to get your name on one of those little tiles?

I love this idea but what if you're having a whole lot of guests (not that we are!) but this could become quite the unwieldy game of Jenga!

In the realm of only slightly less traditional than a traditional guest book is the scrapbook guest book where you provide a page per guest and let them write a message and sign.  Most people who go this route also take a polaroid of each guest to add to the book later. I guess this would also work if you do one of those oh-so-trendy photo booths at your reception.  I'm a hardcore scrapbooker so this idea should probably appeal to me more than it does.  I guess I feel like I have enough DIY projects on my list right now to consider adding another one.

There's the plate or photo mat option but I don't really like either of these.  They just seem kind of sloppy and haphazard and what do you do if one of your guests or their dates decides to be a smartypants and write or draw something distasteful?  You're pretty much screwed, I guess.

I'm starting to wonder if we're going to have enough guests to really make any of these options work.  We're not expecting a huge number of guests.  We're inviting around 100 people to a destination wedding.  We anticipate a lot of no responses.  Of that 100 or so people, a full third of the names are children.  So maybe the photo/scrapbook option is our best bet.

Maybe I need to focus on the "destination" aspect?  I've seen a few postcard guest books.  The couple spreads a bunch of blank postcards on a table and invites their guests to leave a message.  The postcards are then places in a photo album where both sides are visible.  This would be a really cool idea if I could get a quantity of blank vintage Disney World postcards. 

Would that be difficult to do?  I'll have to do a sweep of eBay and the Disney shopping sites I have bookmarked.  Hmmm.  There's possibilities here but I'm not totally sold.

 I've seen notes pinned to curly willow (and have attended at least 3 weddings where this was done), jars and vases and index card boxes but that's just so boring.  I've seen the guestbook made out of the engagement portraits via a website like Shutterfly or Blurb.  What would a princess do? Maybe it's the Disney specific thing I should think about? Even Martha Stewart Weddings couldn't come up with anything new and different!

I guess it's a good thing I have some time to think about this.