how we made our guestbook

Maybe white font wasn't the best choice, but it says "Show Us Some Love!"

My dear readers, we have less than a month to go before I become a Mrs. In my darker moments, all I can think about is how I'd like to play "chubby bunny" with a dozen Doughnut Plant tres leches doughnuts, but pastry cravings aside, I think the #weddingdiet and I are doing OK.

But that's not really that point of this post! I just can't really go for more than about 30 seconds without thinking about food, regardless of whether or not I'm allowed to eat it. Mike is a lucky man.

Anyway.

This post is about our guest book! which is pictured above and I think turned out spectacularly, thanks to Shutterfly, which I will tell you about in a minute.

At my dear friend Liz's wedding last summer, they had a gorgeous guest book with beautiful photos from their engagement shoot pasted in. Everyone could choose their favorite photo and write a note next to it and the whole process was interactive and very "aw" inducing.

Since I knew I wasn't going to get my act together to actually print out all of our engagement pictures for such a lovely project, I turned to the next best thing: photo books! My sister has been making these of her family vacations for years and I love having them on my bookshelf so I can readily pull them out to brag about my niece and nephew. Oh, your niece does gymnastics too? Isn't that nice. Here, look at this photo of Parker doing an aerial while juggling three knives.

I have been a huge fan of Shutterfly ever since my freshman year of college, when they were the website of choice to which we uploaded all of our fleece-wearing, red cup-drinking weekend snapshots. Memories.

Now they have expanded hugely (and luckily my waistline has done the opposite from 2003. Beer.) and feature a whole range of pre-formatted photo books for everything from baby showers to wedding guest books. All I had to do was upload my engagement shots (and luckily Lilian had given us the hi-res files already), pick page layouts and fill in a few captions. You can choose matte vs glossy, pay a little extra for pages that lay flat (definitely worth it for ease of writing), and even add in blank pages to the end of the book so your artistic friends can get all freeform. Now, granted, I definitely spent a few hours making our book as personalized as possible. But you can really whip one of these up in an afternoon.

More photos of the inside of the book post-wedding! For now, I'll spend too many hours agonizing over which shade of metallic marker really speaks to US as a couple. I'm sure Mike will have searing insight.