The guest book

I'm not the biggest fan of signing guest books, mostly because I never know what to write. I'll usually stick to the generic stuff like, "Best wishes" and "Congrats." It's hard to think of something clever and meaningful on the spot. On top of that, just because someone wrote something really sweet in your guest book doesn't mean you'll be friends forever. If we'll be friends forever, we'll be friends forever and no amount of yearbook and guest book signing or not signing will alter the course of our friendship.

Still, having a guest book of some sort isn't a bad thing. There are many versions of the wedding guest book that I've seen. Some asian weddings will have a red silk cloth for people to sign. I'm not sure what happens to this cloth afterward. Many brides opt for a pretty book with blank pages as their guest book. I can certainly go this route but I can guarantee that I won't be touching the book very much after the wedding. So it may very well end up as another object around the house to gather dust, eventually being tossed because it holds no meaning for anybody but me and my sweetie. That's not necessarily a bad thing. It's not like I go and read my yearbook very often, but I did get one and I did get people to sign it, and I have no plans to throw it out anytime soon. However, a conventional guest book just doesn't tickle my fancy. So I went searching for something extraordinary online and on Etsy.com.

Some of the things I found were really creative and very pretty. One bride gave each guest a tag with a ribbon attached and when the guests finished signing the tag, they hung the tag on the branches of a tree. On Etsy, I see a lot of hand-bound books and thumbprint trees. The thumbprint tree is basically a poster of a tree drawn or created by an artist and guests use green ink to place their thumbprint on the tree to make it look like leaves. It's a very creative idea, but I don't really want my guests walking around with green thumbs and my fiance doesn't like the idea of fingerprinting all our guests. Eventually, I found an artisan on Etsy that made tree posters, but instead of thumbprints, she printed out leaves for guests to sign. The leaves are stickers and guests, after signing their name, can stick the leaves onto the tree. It fits in perfectly with what we were looking for. It's unique, fun and pretty enough to frame and display somewhere.

If you'd like to see if this something you'd like for yourself, you can check out the Etsy store here:

http://www.etsy.com/shop/DesignbyMadison