We’ve been making progress on the guest book board. After cutting the plywood to size, sanding and staining it, then cutting, painting, and adding some wood trim for a frame, we used the photo we took before to lay out the hearts on the board in their final position. We also used masking tape to make sure things were symmetrical and evenly placed. Once everything was in place, we nailed in brads so we could hang the hearts on them.

We have been working on the individual hearts and have a lot of them in various stages of completion now. We’ll post more photos when we have some of them finished!

Guest book board so far...

Three sizes of wooden hearts

4" heart glued and clamped

Layout for board sizing

We like the idea of doing unique and creative projects for the wedding. One project that came to mind early on was to do something unique for a guest book. We decided not to do a book at all and started working on ideas to make an art project out of it. We saw one idea where the guest book consisted of a photo on thick board that was cut up into puzzle pieces. Guests sign the back of the puzzle pieces and the whole thing is later assembled and framed to hang on the wall. We didn’t want to do that exactly, but it gave us the idea of doing a collage made up of individual pieces. The pieces will be made so that each one can be signed and personalized on the back, and then it will hang on a board as part of an art piece that we’ll hang on our wall. Originally, we were going to ask our guests to create the front of the piece too, but we decided that was too much to ask – some people may not be creatively inclined or may not have the time to put into doing something like that. Instead, we’ll do the art, and our guests can choose the piece they want to personalize for us. Their message will be on the back, so we can easily look at it anytime (even easier than pulling out a book).

After lots of sketches and idea-gathering, we decided to keep one central theme to our collage: hearts. To give it some visual variety, we went with 3 different sizes of hearts. We found a manufacturer who sells wooden cutout hearts, and we got them in 2.5″, 3″ and 4″ sizes.  The 4″ hearts were half the thickness of the smaller ones, we doubled up our number and glued them together.

Then we marked and drilled holes to hang them by. Next, we carefully primed the backs, sanded that layer to a very smooth finish, and painted them with a nice white semi-gloss paint. We tested it to make sure the finish would accept writing with a Sharpie and it worked great – no ink bleeds, no smudging! The next step was to finish the backing board that the hearts will hang from. We decided to use about 50 hearts all together, so we laid them out on a piece of 1/2″ plywood to decide how large to make the board. We ended up with a board that was 24″ x 36″. We sanded the plywood, stained it, coated it with polyurethane, then attached wood trim around the edges. Then we laid out the hearts again, and marked where the holes in the hearts were with a nail. Then we hammered a 3/4″ brad halfway in for each heart. Adding hardware to the back of the board to hang it on the wall later was the last step.

Now it’s time to decorate the front of the hearts… (to be continued)