A Guest Book Costs Twenty Dollars

For our October 2024 wedding, instead of a guest book, I put out a basket of 4.5” blank, cream-colored fabric squares. A cup of fabric pens next to them. A little sign that said something like sign a square with instructions to not sign close to the edges that absolutely no one read.

If you had asked me then what I was going to do with them, I would have said “a quilt,” with the confidence of someone who knew what their plan was. Alas, I had no pattern. I had no design plan. I had some cream-colored fabric, some pens, and the unshakable belief that Future Me would figure it out.

Future Me did figure it out, but it took her 11 months.

The assignment

There is something about being handed a blank object and a pen that makes guests take the assignment seriously in a way they don’t seem to with a book. I didn’t want a guest book that was going to sit on a shelf, that wasn’t going to be displayed in pride of place.

The squares got doodled on. The squares got inside jokes. The squares got the scribbled “signatures” of your nieces and nephews rather than mom just signing on behalf of the whole family. People were able to re-do their squares if they made mistakes since they aren’t all on one single page or object. It worked beautifully as a creative exercise!

I put a trusted individual in charge of collecting them in a box at the end of the night, and the box went into a closet, and that is where the wedding ended and the actual project began.

The gap year

For most of a year, I had a box of signed fabric and no ideas.

Admittedly, I dithered for a few months and chased up a few relatives who got bashful that their signatures were not worthy of such permanence or never even made it over to the table to sign one for whatever reason. I collected a square from my grandmother who was unable to make the trip to attend, even though she technically wasn’t a guest. Regardless, they were great reasons to reach out to people, and I heartily justified the delay in decision-making with this task.

This is the part I want to be honest about, because it’s the part that gets left out of the version of this story where the quilt just appears, finished, in a photo with good lighting: the box sat there for months. I would open it occasionally, look at dozens of squares of other people’s handwriting, feel a low murmur of guilt, and close it again. I did not have a pattern in mind, I did not know what colors I wanted, and I had made the classic error of committing publicly to a project before having any plan for executing it, which is something I try to avoid doing, generally.

What I eventually realized is that the delay wasn’t a failing, and ultimately, it was the only way the thing could have worked.

What I actually made

I finally screwed up the courage and designed my own pattern. After several attempts at finding an existing pattern, or an example of one that I liked on Pinterest, I landed on a DIY-ing a “picture frame” quilt, or a square-in-a-square. Essentially, the signed squares are arranged in a grid, framed out by contrasting fabric, as if they’re picture frames.

Had I self-drafted a quilt before? No. Did I make a mockup of the square design I had in mind? Also no. Did I go buy a bunch of half yards of pretty batiks and hope it worked out? Maybe!

Sometimes stress and fun are very closely aligned for me, and choosing the palette of the fabrics inspired that blend of anxiety and excitement on a few occasions. I did loosely play on the autumnal colors of the floral arrangements and decor, my beautiful bridesmaids’ dresses, and the venue.

On my wedding day, I did not yet know which parts of it I would still be thinking about a year later. I didn’t know which colors would stand out in my memory, and which ones didn’t really read true. The gap between the wedding and the quilt wasn’t procrastination, it was the necessary interval in which the events of the day sorted themselves into what mattered and what didn’t.

So the quilt isn’t necessarily a record of our wedding itself. Rather, to me, it’s a record of the first year of marriage, visits with friends and family as newlyweds, using the wedding as the inspiration.

The Leslie Knope of it all

I am aware of what this is. I designed a custom pattern, hand-picked a palette of personally significant colors, and assembled dozens of pieces of my loved ones’ handwriting into a portrait of my marriage.

This is a unity quilt of my dreams. This is behavior which I can only attribute to being an overachiever in school. I have somehow made a friendship scrapbook of the most complicated nature, and royally stressed myself out in the process.

I want to be clear that I know, and that I did it anyway, and that I would do it again.

Would I recommend it?

No.

Not really, anyway. If you’re planning a wedding and this article has given you an idea, let me lay out the actual cost. You will be responsible for dozens of precious, small pieces of fabric on a day when you are responsible for many other things. Fabric pens bleed. There was a phase of testing of inks and many washer and dryer cycles to ensure longevity. Some squares will be signed too close to the edge to survive a seam allowance. You will spend much time ironing these little squares and hoping they make it through the wash without bleeding or fading to illegibility. You will crawl around on the ground, organizing the squares perfectly and your back will hurt. Fabric is expensive. You are committing yourself, after spending a year (or more) planning a huge project, to a second project of unknown scope and no deadline.

A guest book costs twenty dollars and takes zero hours. It is a good product. It works.

Final thoughts

So here’s where I land: I don’t really recommend the project and I would not trade the final product for the world. Two things really can be true at once.

I think that might be true of a lot of the things worth making. The recommendation and the result are answering different questions. “Should you do this?” is a question about time and risk and the odds it ends up in a closet someday. “Am I glad I did this?” is a question about the beautiful keepsake that my blood, sweat and tears (no, really, if you’ve ever hand quilted a quilt top before, you know) produced and now hangs on my blanket ladder.

I don’t really recommend it.

Perhaps I’ll write up a pattern of sorts anyway if you too want to be part of the contradictory feeling club.