A Foxy Fête: The Guestbook

Yes, the guestbook gets its own post. From start to end, this thing took a lot of time, a lot of love, and it absolutely had it's fair share of frustrating moments. So I have to do it justice.

Plus, I'm kind of obsessed with the way it turned out!

All photos by Exclamation Imagery unless otherwise noted.

If you recall from wayyy long ago, I started out with my bum traced drawing of the UP house, with the intention of having it eventually be turned into a fingerprint guestbook. It was fairly decent on it's own, but not perfect by any means. As luck would have it, once I turned to the 'Bee for advice, fabulous hive member Miss.E helped a sista out and was able to vectorize the image for me. And it was perfection.

personal images

From there, I was having a helluva time trying to do decide whether to color in the image to mimic the actual UP house, or have it mimic our venue's color scheme (since peachplum09 so kindly pointed out that the two look very similar.. how did I miss that?!).

personal images

In the end, it was a tie. I asked real life friends, I asked you guys, I asked myself about every 5 minutes.

Ultimately, I went for sentiment and decided on the green to represent the Vandiver! So I went to Vistaprint, uploaded my design, placed my order, got my package.. and it sucked. I mean.. it really sucked. The quality was horrendous. My original traced drawing looked better. Seriously.

((I would totally insert a picture here to show you just how bad it was, but I'm pretty sure I threw it out in a matter of minutes. Just trust me on this one.))

I don't know what happened, and I briefly panicked (and got mad that I spent $30 on something useless). So I turned to the manstore (kinda like manwhore, but more store-y) I always turn to in a crafting crisis (that would be Michael's), bought a frame and some poster board, printed out my own copy of the house, oh-so-carefully cut it out, and glued it to the correctly sized poster board. Then I free-handed some stickers at the bottom. Wham, bam, thank you ma'am.

Not too shabby for a complete DIY, right?!

So for the wedding, we had this baby out during cocktail hour, then moved it to a small table at the reception just in case there were a few stragglers who still needed to print it up.

You can also glimpse our UP inspired card mailbox here, too!

I also made sure there was a sign next to the frame to clue people in as to what they should be doing. And, since I was still really torn about the whole color-of-the-house thing, I decided to make the sample house on the sign in the actual colors of the UP house.. best of both worlds!

personal icky cell phone pic

Overall, it turned out to be a hit, and we now have it proudly displayed as part of our living room decor.

another personal icky cell phone pic

Now I do have a few tips, in case you're planning on going the route of a fingerprint guestbook:

1. In addition to having a sign with instructions, be sure to get your bridal party and/or family to start off the fingerprinting at the rehearsal dinner the night before the wedding, or while getting ready the morning of. It (hopefully) ensures that guests will figure out what to do a bit more easily!

personal cell phone pics courtesy of Foxy Mama

2. Have Wet Naps for people to wipe the ink off their fingers, and a small trash bin for them to throw used ones away. This way, no one has an excuse not to do it!

3. Speaking of which, if you have any guests who have a super fancy job that they can't always talk about.. they won't put their fingerprint on your guestbook. We definitely learned that one.

4. Also, people still don't always get what to do, even when you tell them. We had a lot of "floating" balloons.. and some genius thought it would be super fun to put their fingerprints in the windows of the house. (Something Foxy and I are still kind of annoyed about, to be honest!)

But anyway. I still think it came out pretty spiffy!

(The other slightly annoying part of all this is that someone evidently took my artwork a few months back and tried selling it as their own on Etsy, until a group of us contacted her & reported her behavior to the site. So.. don't steal my artwork. Kthanks.)

Would you consider a fingerprint guest book? Do you have any other tips for future brides about them?

Miss a recap? Catch yourself up!

It's Wedding Week! - The week of the wedding started out pretty hectic, but we made it through (relatively) unscathed.

We're Cool People (who had to deal with a slight change of plans) - On Friday, we made our way to the venue, had a relatable moment on the radio, and learned about some last minute changes that we made an effort to take in stride.

Practice Makes Perfect.. And Crabs Don't Hurt, Either - After most everyone was settled in on Friday evening, we had our rehearsal followed by the best dinner ever - a Maryland crab feast!

Rise and Shine! - Wedding morning was soon upon us, and I woke up at the crack of dawn ready to get prettified.

Pretty Women - Over the course of the next several hours, myself and the girls hung out, got our hair and makeup done, had a photo shoot, and drank champagne.

Dressing Up - Soon enough, it was time for me to slip into my dress!

Dapper Dudes - At the same time, Foxy and his guys were ironing and getting into their suites - and Foxy was opening his wedding day gift!

The First of Many Looks - We had our first look, and both felt so much better after being able to see each other for the first time that day.

A School Bus Photoshoot - Our vehicle of choice for the day was a school bus, which we turned into a photo op both inside and out!

Smiles and Sun - The photos continued by the lighthouse and pier.. with sunglasses and a few funny stories along the way.

ALL The Family - We then met up with family at the lock house for even more pictures, and I started getting a bit antsy and having problems with my dress.

And Then There's Us - I kinda-sorta-maybe forgot all about couple and bridal pictures. Thank goodness for our amazing photog reminding us!

Final Touches - Slight chaos then ensued in the minutes before the ceremony started, consisting of me getting sewn into my dress and the boys getting their bouts pinned on at the last minute.

And So It Begins - The guests arrive, the wedding party lines up, and the ceremony space is revealed - complete with programs, white knots, and bubbles!

All I Want Is You, Will You Be My Bride? - The time had finally come - we all made our way down the aisle while my stepdad and stepbro played and sang a beautiful, acoustic version of "All I Want Is You".

Take Me By The Hand and Stand By My Side - In other words.. the ceremony!

Bubbles and Bustles and Beverages, Oh My! - Bubbles are blown, my bustle is tied in, and cocktail hour commences with lots of love, hugs, and drinks.

A Floaty Guestbook Part 2 - Decision Time

When we last left off, I asked for your opinions on my hand drawn version of the UP house to use for our finger print guestbook. There were some marvelous suggestions and alternative ideas, but I knew I really wanted to try and use my hand drawn house in some way, shape, or form. Preferably a cleaned up version, but still the house in some essence.

Welp, I didn't have much time to mull over my options because hive member Miss.E messaged me later that very same day; apparently this awesome lady just voluntarily whipped up a vector image of my house using a program called Inkscape (I gather that it's like a free version of Illustrator!). When I opened up the attachment, I was stunned. She took this..

..and morphed it into this!

Do you SEE how amazing it looks?! I was instantly in love and knew that I could make this work. Yet another reason why Weddingbee and its community is the bee's knees! (Pun obviously intended.)

The next step was to spruce it up a bit by adding some color. Peachplum09, the smarty pants that she is, so keenly previously observed that the house looked a bit like our venue.

Image via Vandiver Inn

Since I wasn't about to go and trace the Vandiver itself (fantastic concept.. much too intricate for me, heh), I figured, why not color it in like the Vandiver?

It really is green in real life, promise!

Keep in mind the lines coming out of the chimney will be where the balloon fingerprints will eventually go. My only issue with using these colors is that I have no idea what colors we would do for the ink pads. As much as I love its likeness to our venue, I'm just not sure what colors would actually "go" with it, you know?

To give myself options, I also created a colored in version that mimicked the actual UP house.

 SO cute, right? I love the brightness and springy feel of it, and we could either use all sorts of colors or just turquoise and orange for the balloons and it would look fantastic either way. But.. it has no real "connection" to the wedding, other than the fact that we love UP. And that it's pretty looking.

To be honest, I like both of the colored in houses. Everyone I've asked agrees, and no one can decide which we should go with.

So I leave it up to the hive!! What do you think: option 1 a la the Vandiver, or option 2 a la UP?

INSERT POLL
Which house do we use for the guestbook?
Option 1 - Green like the Vandiver
Option 2 - Colorful like UP

A Floaty Guestbook.. DIY?

I've had a shockingly odd amount of ideas for our guestbook. As is the trend lately, none of them included an actual book.

The initial idea was to have people sign around a picture that would eventually be framed. It wasn't going to be one of Foxy and I, though; instead, I have a print by an artist named Kurt Halsey that I absolutely adore and thought would be just perfect.

Image via Art Star

So cute, right? But I wasn't *quite* sold. Almost, but not entirely.

Then I thought something akin to the Quaker marriage certificates might be nice.

Images via the Merriment blog

I especially love the one on the right, but I still wanted a bit more. I must admit that I have been secretly loving the fingerprint trees that seem to be so popular as of late.

Via Etsy shop Love From The Thumb

Then, in one of my daily searches on Etsy, I saw something a bit different.. it was still a fingerprint guestbook, but it evoked a certain fantabulous Disney Pixar movie.

Via Etsy shop bleu de toi

Up, anyone? I mean, I just love that movie, and I love the idea of using it as a guestbook. My only issue was not wanting to spend upwards of $60 on a print that I just might be able to reproduce and get printed at Kinko's for a third of the price. So try and DIY, I did.

First and foremost, I printed out the clearest picture I could of the Up house - this actually happened to be a photo of the real life version of the house that was built in Utah.

Image via The Awesomer

Next, I took a sheet of velum and traced the image twice: first with pencil, then with a black marker.

Since it was looking kind of.. rough.. after the pencil and even the marker, I decided to scan it into Photoshop and touch it up a bit with the eraser tool. A few adjustments and some added text later, I ended up with this:

I'm actually a bit surprised at how reasonable it looks.. I was a bit wary after I finished the pencil outline with all the smudgies and wavy lines and such. But, as if you didn't know this already, Photoshop seriously does wonders. All it needs now are the balloon strings, and then I can bring it to Kinko's to be printed out on a yet to be determined sized piece of poster paper.

The thing is, I'm in desperate need of your help. I'm afraid that, to quote Cher, "(it's) a full-on Monet.. from far away, it's ok, but up close it's a big old mess."

What do you think, hive? I'm sure no one will really be analyzing this all that much, but should I keep going with the DIY route? If I do.. is black and white good enough or should I try and get fancy and color it in?