How to Scrapbook a Wedding After the Wedding

Natalie from Almost Never Clever, posted about needing wedding album ideas, so I commented about my wedding album, but thought I would share a bit more detailed response here.

It took me awhile because I still can not find the best conditions to photograph layouts in my house. I also couldn’t decide which pages to share. Sharing all of them would be a lot, so I decided to focus on a selection of pages.

Before you see my layouts, keep in mind that we had a slightly unconventional wedding. We were engaged in 2002. After saying yes, I told my then-fiance that I would not be a 20-year-old bride so we had a prolonged engagement. Finally, one day in 2005, I suggested we go ahead and get married at the courthouse. We called our parents and they joined us for our marriage ceremony at a courthouse in downtown Atlanta, with a bunch of other couples. It was perfect.

Most of my family and friends live in Illinois and my husband’s are a bit more spread out so we had a reception a couple of months later in Illinois to celebrate our marriage.

We didn’t take our honeymoon for several more months because I was going to graduate school and teaching so we waited until summer vacation to take our honeymoon.

The scrapbook about our wedding contains the photographs and memorabilia and story of our wedding, reception, and honeymoon.



Because we had a couple of months between our wedding and the reception, I scrapbooked all of our wedding photos and displayed that portion of the album at our reception.







I used this scrapbook as our guestbook, too. I cut up cardstock to the size of business cards and had people write us their words of wisdom instead of a traditional guestbook. If you do this, make sure you have someone who will go around and make sure people have at least signed one of the cards for the album (even if all they do is sign it).



We did not have a professional photorapher for our wedding or reception. We had those disposable cameras for guests to use at each table. I probably would not do that again. If I had to do my reception over, I probably would have hired someone to take photos and maybe create a group on flickr for guests to share photos that they took with their own cameras. The biggest problem with the disposable cameras is they do not work well in the lighting you typically have at a wedding reception.



And then of course, here are a couple of layouts from our honeymoon:







If I had a more conventional wedding with a professional wedding photographe, I would probably do a photobook of most of the professional photos and select just a few of those for inclusion in my wedding scrapbook. I would use the scrapbook to more tell the story and a photo book to more just show the story. Doing a photobook might be good, too, if there are other folks (like your mom or maid of honor) who would appreciate a copy of all the photos but would not then scrapbook the photos. After completing a more unconventional album (post of complete project to appear July 16) and a photobook of our recent vacation (post to appear July 8). I am really thinking my scrapbooking of “events” may have been changed forever. I am really finding doing both formats really appealing with each book having a slightly different purpose.

What about you? How did you do your wedding scrapbook? Or, how would you do a wedding scrapbook? Comment below or join the conversation on facebook or twitter.

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Stephanie