Here are a couple of pictures for you. I was kind of disappointed with how the cover turned out because the design looks kind of dirty (but it doesn't look like that on the website), but everything else turned out well! If you want to see the entire guest book, I have embedded it below so you can click through it.
As you can see, I tried to leave as much blank space as possible. Since it is only an 8x8 book, I was really paranoid about running out of space for people to sign. I figured some will just write their names, but I wanted to make sure that if people wanted to write us a message, that they would be able to do so. I also was worried that I would leave too much white space and it would feel empty. Ah, the balance!
The default for Shutterfly photo books is 20 pages so I went ahead and expanded it to 29 pages to spread out some of the pictures/leave some pages completely blank. We decided that we are not going to have a guest book attendant, but I have made a sign that we will place next to the book that tells our guests what to do. Hopefully they write throughout the entire book, but we'll have to wait and see!
After checking the guest book off the wedding to-do list, I set out to find a pen that would work with the photo paper without smearing. It would break my heart to find our guest book a big, messy smudge so I did some research on weddingbee.com to see what other brides have done before me.
Most bee's suggested using either a Sharpie or an archival acid-free pen. I went to Hobby Lobby in search of a pretty Sharpie and found this:
Looks fancy right? Turns out, its no good for our guest book. It is only a "fine" tip, not an "ultra-fine" tip and it smudges like crazy. I tried it out on some paper that was similar to our guest book and it was a big fail.
I went ahead and decided to give sharpie another try and bought Sharpie Ultra Fine Tip Permanent Markers and tested it out. Much better results were achieved this time! I also gave regular Sharpie Fine Point Permanent Marker a run and you can see the results below. I wiped my finger over the ink about one second after I finished writing:
The Ultra Fine Tip, middle, definitely wins the smudge wars here. I don't think it dries automatically, but it is set within a second or two. Being a left-handed person (and incredibly familiar with smudge-marked hands while writing), this could still potentially cause problems, but we are working in the right direction! I have heard that Sakura Pigma Micron pens are the way to go, so I might find myself giving them a try just yet. Apparently they are much more fade-resistant than Sharpies are and come highly recommended on the WeddingBee circuit.
All in all, I am quite pleased with out wedding guest/photo book. I think it will be fun for our guests to find a place to sign their name or leave us some advice/wishes. It reminds me of yearbook signing when I was in school which was always fun.
The original price for the book was $29.99 and the extra nine pages were $9.00.
The book was free with my Best Buy code and I also had a 50% off code which made the extra pages only $4.50
Shipping at $7.99 and tax at $1.07 made the total $13.56
Not too bad in my opinion! While it wasn't technically free like I would have liked, the cost came in equal to a plain photo book and much cheaper than a personalized photo book. And I get to check another to-do off my growing list!
Let me know what you think! Did you do (or are you planning) a photo book for your wedding? If so, what type of pen did you use?
Check out our full wedding guest/photo book below!
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