How to Make a Guestbook for a Wedding With a Wood Cover

For our wedding we wanted to have a somewhat different type of guestbook. We wanted to have one with a cover made out of wood.

In our case, we wanted bamboo wood. It was very difficult to find bamboo wood on the thickness we wanted (around 3mm) and on the size of a book. Therefore, we bought a cheap chopping board that it is made out of bamboo wood.

This chopping board had a thickness of around 2cm so we could "easily" cut in the middle to have two boards. It takes quite some effort indeed to cut it in the middle with a manual saw. Moreover, it turns out that the bulk of the material is a different type of wood and only the top part is bamboo wood, but that was ok for us. If you have an automatic saw that might be easier for you.

After sawing the chopping board in two pieces, we had to smoothen the wood using a sand paper. For this step it's better and easier to have an electric sander. It will make life much easier since you might want to decrease a bit the thickness too. In our case the back side is thicker and it's around 7mm, the front cover is around 4mm. We were just lazy to make it equal and it looks ok with different thickness. You should also make the edges. We used a sandpaper of 60 to decrease the thickness of the board and 120 afterwards to finish it. The surface must be very smooth otherwise the laser engraving might go rough.

We decided to have 3 holes instead of 4. I recommend 3 or more since 2 might be not so stable. We used a 4mm drill bit.

We used a laser cutter in FabLab Leuven to engrave our names. The file was made on Illustrator and Inkscape. It can be easily made in these software. You just need to write a text with the desired font type and size and look for the option to create the outline. Remember to make on the correct size of the board you cut before.

We have chosen to use a thick paper: Aquarelle Paper 300g. Make holes with equal distance as on the covers. We chose to put all together with a simple rope. You might want to look for a ring or something else if you prefer.