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Im sure you are all familiar with the traditional wedding guestbook...you know that lame book that we all sign that the couple probably throws away after a year or so.  Well when I was getting ready to get married I knew I wanted to do something different than the boring old wedding guest book, I just never saw the point of that.  I ran across an article on theknot.com (because what bride doesnt spend hours a day on the knot.com before there was pinterest!) that had different ideas for a guest book and there were some pretty good ones!  Among the top ones for me was a picture of the couple with a big mat the guests could sign, another was a tree where the guests would use green stamp ink to make the leaves of the tree, but my favorite was the one that I ended up using and that was fabric squares that you make into a quilt.  With fabric squares, each guest can write you a message, draw a picture, just sign their name, whatever they want it lends to more creativity on their part and I loved that idea.  I think everyone that came to our wedding in Orlando and the reception in Houston all signed a square at least once and I have this beautiful (ok so the quilt needs work) quilt that I can look at all the time and be reminded of the love of our guests on our special day.

I know this picture isnt very big, and thats a little by design so you cant see all the horrible stitching in the quilt.  I think Im going to take it and have it professionally done because my husband and I did an AWFUL job putting this together.  I know nothing about quilting so I did the best I could, but let me tell you what we did.

Pre-wedding I cut about 100 fabric squares about 4x5 so they were large enough for people to write and for me to sew but not too large that I would have to have this massive quilt to deal with. 

Wedding Day I had my bridesmaids have the squares on the tables with sharpies and fabric pens and told the guests what to do with the squares.  At the end of the night they picked them all up and gave them back to me.

Post-Wedding was a little more interesting.  I had this brilliant idea to lay all the squares out on the floor so I would have the perfect pattern (all seriousness this was a good idea it just took forever), but the "brilliant" idea was that I didnt cut the square perfectly so they werent all the same size.  As I started sewing each row together piece by piece I noticed it wasnt 100% straignt, but I figured it would work out in the end.  Well it didnt.  As Joe tried to sew all the rows together to make the big quilt the rows werent all the same length or width so he had a hard time there.  Once he patched all the rows together we got a really big sheet of green fabric for the backing and batting to go in the middle (pretty sure that is right for quilting but I dont know anymore), getting the batting to sit right was the hard part and its still not laying right because we suck at sewing.  Now you can understand why I dont want to try and learn how to sew this project scared me for life!

To date this quilt is hanging in the office where I look at it all the time.  I dont notice so much that it is pretty much falling apart, I notice more the notes people wrote and the drawings that were done.  I do want to have this fixed so it doesnt fall apart one day and have all those notes lost but I do love that we put it together as a couple (Im not gonna lie there were fights!) and it is still standing through the move.  I cant wait for our 50th where we look at this just as fondly as we do today.

If you are married, what did you do for your guestbook, and if you had the traditional book what did you do with it!!

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