Aline & Stijn chose to spread their celebrations over 2 days. This blogpost - and the book - is mainly about their big celebrations in march 2026.
07/03/2026
I had the honour to document A&S’ civil wedding in july 2025, followed by a ceremonial (big! party!) celebration earlier this year.
The dress code? Happy colours & happy socks - which is a perfect illustration of the couple in my opinion. From doing hair & make-up with friends to handing out aspirins as a goodbye gift, I understand why they trusted me blind when I proposed to bind their book with fabric of A’s second wedding dress. They love the unexpected, they love some silliness too.
A&S’ 2026 day in photography numbers
A 2-year process, from first contact until last delivery
10 hours of documentation, resulting in 938 delivered images
A total of 29 hours of prep, shooting and editing. I didn’t quite time the making of the book- too much trial and error still.
The handbound book is a hardcover, counting 94 pages of A&S’s selected favourites. A box for safekeeping included.
The wedding dress book.
Aline & Stijn supported me in a carte blanche-way. I made a few suggestions, they told me they trusted me entirely. And honestly, kudos to them for doing so without me showing any examples. Not even a Pinterest board!
I chose a vertical, 23x32cm format - I’m not an A4 enthousiast - French stitch linked body, with a linen hardcover, covered by fabric from Aline’s dress.
To keep the book safe for transportation, I made it a simple wooden box, covered with linen. It held a Polaroid I took right before the ceremony.
A&S were able to give me a lot of material to work with. Aside from the wedding dress fabric, I received greeting cards from guests and stationary. To top it off, I respectfully took some stuff from the wedding, too! A napkin, name cards & a bunch of Polaroids I took during the day.
The wedding dress is obviously the star of this show, and also the most difficult factor of the book. I won’t bother you with the nerdy stuff, but in order to get a pretty, soft result I put a lot of research into different types of glue.
The greeting cards ended up being an essential part of the book, embedded throughout the pages. I wanted A&S to have a clean collection of their wishes, instead of depositing them in a memory box.
I secretly took one of their fabric napkins home. They turned out to be ideal as head- and tailbands. Have a closer look at the pink fabric were the center of the pages meet.
The box and book linen are a shade of green Aline really loves.
The Polaroid in the box was inteded to be the original, but in the end I used a scanned version that is more UV-resistant. I didn’t want the original to fade over time. A fun note - this photo is also the opener of the book!
From first contact until book delivery, 2 years and 2 celebrations went by. All materials for this book were sourced locally, except for the paper. This double sided lustre came from across the channel - a brand of paper I love and trust.
One million thanks to Aline & Stijn, for the love, trust, flexibility and enthousiasm. I really do hope we meet again! <3