Polaroid Guest Book - A picture is worth a thousand words..
Brides on the Knot have been forgoing the traditional “sign-your-name-here” guest book for ages. While there are many alternatives, one that is growing in popularity is the polaroid guestbook. The folks at Adesso Albums have even created an album specifically for this purpose, it includes a window in each page where you slide the polaroid in:
While this is a great option for many brides, there are a few drawbacks, namely price (they run about $60 each) and flexibility - the pages are bound in, so if you have more groups of guests than pages you need two albums.
For my wedding I not only wanted that flexibility, I also wanted the book to look more like it fit in with the theme of my wedding. Already burdened with too many last minute DIY projects, I was thrilled when my graphic designer sister Roxanne offered to take this project over as her gift to us.
We decided on the Newbury album from Kolo:
The album fit all our requirments: It come in many different colors (we chose “camel”) It had a window so we could personalize it with our picture or logo, and best of all it is expandable. It comes with 20 sheets, is expandable to 30 sheets - which means that you can have up to 60 pages which should cover you for at least 120 guests (The adesso album hold only 30 pictures and so half as many guests.)
The other benefit of an expandable album is that you can actually take it apart at the wedding and have people signing pages simultaneously.
The Final Result
Here’s how our guestbook looked with our logo printed in the window:
And here are some of the inside pages filled out by the guests:
Other Tips
I get asked alot about the camera and film. We bought the Poloaroid 600 camera at walmart. I can’t remember the exact price but I think it was around $32. I do remember seeing it at Walgreens cheaper because they often have sales/rebates on the camera. By far the best deal on the film that we found (polaroid film can be very expensive!) was from Costco. They came in packs of 50. We figured we’d need 60, so we bought one extra single pack of 10 exposures at Walgreens. We ended up with one extra pack. So for our 90 guests we used about 50 exposures.
To adhere the poloroid to the guestbook, we used that rollon craft glue stuff that people use for scrapbooking that should be available at your local craft store. Here’s an example of one from Sav-on-Crafts:
Definitely ask a close friend to “man” the guestbook. This was something we decided at the last minute, but probably saved the whole project. I heard later that he was very (gently) persistant at asking people to please have their picture taken and sign the book… and its probably thanks to him that we got as many pages filled out as we did.
That should be all the information you need to create your own photo guestbook. let me know how yours turns out!
1 comment August 12th, 2006
