How to Turn a Globe into a Guest Book for your Wedding

When I was planning my wedding I had fifty bazillion decisions to make (yes that’s a real number… I counted). What color napkins should I pick? What bridesmaids dresses would work for ALL of my girls… and be in budget? Could the best man wear converse (NO!)… It took a while to work through the staggering amount of fluff to decide every single little detail. If you are a bride (or have ever been a bride, holla!) then you know what I’m talking about! It’s enough to make you want to scream!

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The one decision I didn’t have to work to hard on was my guest book. I knew that I didn’t want your typical paper bound book filled with signatures. I was afraid that it would get stuck on a shelf in the back of a closet somewhere, collecting dust… completely forgotten about. I didn’t want my memories to be dusty! I wanted something that would be seen everyday… out in the open… not just in plain sight but part of the decor!

I love antiques, all things blue and traveling around the globe… so when I found the idea of using non-traditional items for a guest book I knew immediately what I wanted to use. A globe. A REALLY big globe. Not a teeny tiny globe that my guests would have to fight over real-estate on but a big honking one that would blend into my decor at home… while standing out. I didn’t want it to be forgotten!

My mom and I looked around for a while trying to find the perfect globe… until one day I got this picture:

It’s large (my mom had to have help to carry it out of the store), tealy blue (so it goes with my color scheme)(yes tealy is a word…) and the base isn’t make out of weird wood (read as: easily painted silver!). It seemed like the perfect globe! Mom took it home and the next time I made the trip to Alabama we fixed her up.

The only downside of using a globe as a guest book is that the surface is slick… read as: not good for signing. Plus the black writing for all of the countries and oceans would be hard to read peoples signatures over. So we decided to do what any rational bride and mother-of-the-bride would do… we painted it.

Using a bit of Annie Sloan Chalk Paint in Paris Grey we gave the entire globe a light wash. All this means is that we mixed a tiny bit of water with a tiny bit of paint and put on LIGHT layers. We wanted a slight grey sheen to the top of the globe so that the surface would be easier to write on… but we didn’t want a solid grey globe. The point of the globe was that it was a GLOBE… not a giant grey orb. We painted the base with a solid paris grey mixture.

I was worried about the whole painting the globe thing (it was so pretty! I didn’t want to screw it up!) but it turned out so good! Even my little brother looked at it when he got home that night, screwed up his face in that way boys get when they’re thinking and went “It looks good, I think this will be easier to sign then before”. Which was impressive since he knew nothing of my internal should-I-paint-my-globe-or-not-list-of-pros-and-cons-debate. He (of course) had been tuning out wedding talk for months at this point.

It looked amazing at the wedding! I am so glad that we went with a globe instead of a traditional guest book!

As good as it looked at the wedding? It looks even better in our living room! I love walking past it every day and seeing where people signed… I’m pretty sure my brother is Antarctica.